Chapter 4

Stylistics and motivated choice in Seamus Heaney’s “Orange Drums”

In this chapter I will perform a stylistic analysis of “Orange Drums, Tyrone, 1966” by Seamus Heaney, one of Peter Verdonk’s favourite poets (cf. his discussions of poems by Heaney in Verdonk 1993: 57–65 and Verdonk 2002). I will mainly indulge in what has sometimes been called “steam stylistics” (Carter 2007, Gavins & Stockwell 2012), which concentrates on motivated choices at all linguistic levels in relation to meaning, effect and style. Steam stylistics has, of course, been supplemented in recent years by a number of useful analytical approaches, such as corpus stylistics (e.g. McIntyre & Walker 2019, Semino & Short 2004), narrative analysis (e.g. Alber & Fludernik 2010, Herman 2013), cognitive stylistics (e.g. Gavins and Steen 2003, Stockwell 2002), and Text World Theory (e.g. Gavins 2007, Werth 1999). My main motivation in this chapter is to analyse the language of the poem in as much detail and as dispassionately as I am able, to characterise the text and my understanding and appreciation of it. This approach, allied to being as open, honest and truthful as we can be, lies, in my view, at the heart of the stylistics enterprise. Given that I have now been retired for more than ten years, I am not as up to date on the various new approaches to analysis as I might once have been, but hopefully, others can add to, and correct, my mainly steam-driven attempt. I have supplemented my analysis with some corpus-based work, however, along with the occasional remark in relation to the other approaches referred to above. Peter Verdonk similarly used steam stylistics accompanied by insights from more recent approaches to the field when he analysed texts. “Orange Drums”, which is usefully short enough to analyse in stylistic detail in a short paper, shows Heaney developing his distinctive poetic voice and, although not one of his finest poems, certainly has its own poetic merits. Peter Verdonk himself used it as part of an unpublished talk he gave to an early PALA conference.