I AM BETROTHED": QUERYING QUEERNESS IN HEANEY’S CATTLE POEMS

Cattle played a central role in Seamus Heaney's childhood, as he grew up on an Irish farm where his dad, Patrick Heaney, worked as a cattle dealer. However, cattle have always played a central role in Ireland, as they are leading figures in Táin Bó Cúailnge, the Irish epic, and were partly responsible for shaping the agricultural system in Ireland, as Eric Guiry and others explain in their study. Throughout his career, Heaney explores the connections cattle share with the Irish and himself by expressing the cattle's relationship with agriculture and their use in it. Furthermore, he illuminates their experience by showing the instrumentalization the cattle undergo due to their existence on the farm. In this thesis, I argue that Heaney's representation of the cattle explores their exploitation through empathetic narrators as they contend with their own lives. Through this, I connect the cattle's experience with that of queer people, as I find them to have a similar understanding of oppression. By recognizing the connection between queerness and the cattle, I explore a topic that has received little representation in the robust amount of Heaney scholarship. In examining poems from throughout Heaney's career, from Death of a Naturalist to Seeing Things, I separate the cattle's experience into three parts. Chapter One centers on the cow's disappearance in his poems as she goes through a reproductive cycle in four of his poems, "The Outlaw," "Cow in Calf," "First Calf," and "The Milk Factory." I connect this disappearance in reproduction to queerness by referencing their shared experience with reproductive exploitation. I continue the narrative of reproduction into Chapter Two, where I compare the experience of one of Heaney's bulls to the Táin Bó Cúailnge. I find that their symbolism as the "epitome of fertility and virility" is subverted by the roles they play in both the epic and Heaney's poem (Veltan 23). The cattle's subversion of the fertile symbol is where I centralize the connection between queerness and the bulls. I end with Heaney's connection to cattle and explore this in five of his poems, "Ancestral Photograph," "Requiem for the Croppies," "An Evening at Killard," "The Strand at Lough Beg," and "Keeping Going." While the connection to queerness is less prominent in this chapter, I find his exploration of grief in tandem with cattle to establish a melancholy tie that Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands explores in the queer experience. This project serves to illuminate a connection that has gone unnoticed and create a space where these connections between Heaney and queer theory can be explored. In a world that continues the exploitation of queer people and cattle through erasure, this project is a testament to how queerness can manifest in the most unlikely of places and thereby refuse to be ignore.<p></p>