I read District and Circle (2006) in the context of a poetry of praise and the influence of Czesław Miłosz. Heaney’s poetry of praise is intimately connected to his sense of place and the title of the collection suggests that Heaney is circling back over his childhood district of Mossbawn. When Heaney turns to Virgil in his final collection Human Chain (2010), he does so partly in place of a Catholicism that has been increasingly displaced throughout his work. However, I conclude that the foundational questions of Heaney’s childhood faith – post-mortem existence, how we commune with the dead, the longing for something beyond the bounds of material sense – account, in part, for his turning to Virgil and, specifically, to Book VI of the Aeneid, a full translation of which was posthumously published in 2016. In the end, in a synthesis of Christian and Classical, Heaney’s poetry finds a unifying vision which allows him to retain a felt sense for his Catholic upbringing even as he moves beyond its orthodox expression.

A cliché of Heaney criticism is that his poetry can be divided into two phases: an earlier one of bog and body, a later one of air and spirit. It is less frequently observed that a third phase emerged in the late Heaney. His poems no longer treat body or spirit as a binary but explore the catalytic relationship between them, and the constant movement, between time and eternity, between the past and the present, between the represented and the representation, between history and memory, between filiation and affliliation. His poetry never erupted into a fulminating rage against the killings of the Troubles as an inevitable consequence of a rancid politics. A therapeutic function is fundamental to Heaney’s poetry. Violence enters his poetry as painful and wounding divisions, to which his poetry is applied as a healing ointment.