According to the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, the expression ‘casualty means a person who is killed or injured in a war or in an accident. The term is generally used in connection with the number of victims in a violent clash or operation or a serious accident.

In his poem Casualty, Heaney has used the word in that sense. Of course, his concern here is the operation of the English paramilitary force against the Irish catholic nationalists on Bloody Sunday, January 30, 1972. Thirteen Irish Nationalists were killed in that operation. They were the casualties of the English operation and that was shamelessly written down on the wall, as stated in the poem:

Such a writing on the wall, as if it were a football score, was cruel enough. But that casualty, mentioned in the poem, is not the only one. Heaney’s poem presents another casualty. That was the death of a fisherman in a bomb-blast. Heedless of the curfew imposed, he went to drink in a pub and was blown to pieces. He was, too, a casualty of the atrocious (1) rulers’ operation. Thus, the theme of the poem revolves round the ‘casualty’. So this is a justifiable title of the poem.

The atrocity of the British rule on the Irish people was almost unbearable. The Irish people wanted to get themselves free from the British imperialistic rule. As a result, there was the growing discontentment of the Irish people against the British rule. That gradually turned to the worst and there was an Irish uprising against the British occupation in Ireland. That uprising, definitely on a righteous cause, took place during the Easter 1916. The result, of course, was disastrous for the Irish nationalists and a good many of them lost their lives.

The celebrated Irish poet Yeats wrote a commemoration for the subject, fallen in the cause of freedom in his much celebrated poem Easter 1916.

Seamus Heaney’s Casualty is found to bear some resemblance to the subjectmatter of that Irish uprising against the British brutality. Of course, he is found opposed to the use of his literary craft for any political campaign or propaganda. At the same time, the textures of his literary works are found woven with the materials of his experience in life. His experience about the British rulers’ way of treating the poor Irish nationalists is not at all pleasant. The truth of his experience is something different and that is expressed in his celebrated poem Casualty.

An elegy is decisively a poem of mourning, or, as elsewhere characterised, a song of lamentation. Mourning or lamentation forms actually the central element in an elegy. Here comes the essential requisites of an elegy-the mourner, the mourned and the object of mourning. Because an elegy is mainly a subjective poem, the mourner is the poet or author. The mourned may be a person, dead or separated, on a matter or an element-a lost beauty, a ruined place, or a much esteemed ideal. The last element-the object of mourning may well be varied-death, separation, loss, extinction or destruction.

Heaney’s Casualty is taken often as a powerful modern elegy. The poet is found to express his deep sense of sorrow. He is the mourner. But whom does he mourn and why? He mourns for death-an untimely death by an act of shameless cruelty. The poem, as its very title implies, indicates casualty. But what casualty the poem presents? There are two occasions of casualty, as presented by the poet. First, thirteen Irish catholics, on the bloody Sunday January 30, 1978, were killed by the British paramilitary troops. Second, the fisherman, the poet’s friend, who took the risk of the curfew to get drink and got blown into pieces by the bomb-blast.

Heaney mourns in his poem Casualty, for the fisherman with whom he used to drink occasionally. He was not any political accomplice (2, ³). He was a plain man who ‘drank like a fish’, sometime in a company and sometime all by himself. He was stout, discreet, ‘a dole-kept breadwinner’, ‘a natural for work’ (a fisherman’s work). The poet frankly admits, “I loved his whole manner, sure-footed, but too shy’. He was polite enough and informal in his approach. But he had one weakness-lure for the pub. He cared for no curfew for his drink. But there was the bomb-blast and he was blown to bits. The poet saw, in that bombed offending place, ‘remorse fused with terror, in his still knowable face’.

This signals Heaney’s turning to the art of elegy, with its shifts between public utterance of private feeling, to commemorate the fisherman, a fixture of the pub scene, “blown to bits/Out drinking in a curfew/Others obeyed.” It is also through the act of elegy that the role of an observer shifts from the fisherman, observing the poet in the pub, to the poet watching the fisherman in a haunted imagination. Through the shifting from simile into metaphor, the fisherman who “drank like a fish” ultimately becomes a fish, “swimming” out of cliche and “towards the lure/Of warm lit-up places.”

The final turning in part three is even more remarkable for its suave displacements. Though Heaney admits missing the fisherman’s funeral, he envisions the mourner’s “shoaling out of his lane/ … / With the habitual / Slow consolation/ Of a dawdling engine,” the sound of which seamlessly joins the funeral occasion to “that morning/ I was taken in his boat,/ The screw purling, turning/ Indolent fathoms white.” The “indolent fathoms” of poetry are indeed slow to develop, but it’s on such waters that, in the fisherman’s company, the poet “tasted freedom.”

To get out early, haul Steadily off the bottom, Dispraise the catch, and smile As you find a rhythm Working you, slow mile by mile, Into your proper haunt Somewhere, well out, beyond…

The poet turns here to a tribute appropriate to a fisherman who was thorough conversant with his world-the fish and the sea. There is nothing political in Heaney’s mourning for the man who had no political link, and a casualty without any cause, except his excessive passion for drink. But was he culpable for his death? The question is haunting him with no ready answer. This is a personal question in a personal elegy.

The poem Casualty by Seamus Heaney is taken as an elegy written on the death of an Irish fisherman. The fisherman remains unnamed all through the poem, although the poet admitted subsequently that the man concerned was Louis O’Neil, who was killed during the conflicts surrounding the dark day in Irish history, known as ‘Bloody Sunday’.

The noblelist for literature in 1995  Seamus Heaney is a big name in English poetry of recent times. Hailing from North Ireland, Heaney is found to bear the characteristic Irish outlook in his literary pursuits.

Heaney’s Casualty, supposed to be one of his most touching poems, presents a theme, quite serious and a technique quite felicitous. The poet presents in the poem what happened to one of his friends, a fisherman by profession. He was a poor victim, rather indirectly, of the operation of the British paratroopers. Thirteen Irish Catholics were brutally assassinated by the British soldiers. The poet’s fisherman-friend, later identified as Louis O’Neill, was no victim of that operation. He was rather a non-participant in the agitation, but lost his life in a bomb explosion, while violating the curfew to quench  his thirst for wine. That violent and unfortunate death, deeply shocking and stirring, results in an elegiac expression in the poem. Indeed, “Casualty”, taken as one of the most powerful elegies exemplifies Heaney’s evolving identity as an Irish poet from the north who is torn between public commitments and personal freedom, and who shares his language and literary antecedents with the English and the Irish alike. Because the political conflict of Ireland is inscribed in Heaney’s personal and poetic drama, it is fundamental to the understanding of the shades of Heaney’s great elegy.

Yet, the poet has a message to convey implicitly. The sudden and unwanted awful end of the unnamed fisherman exposes that such a violent way is not humanworthy. It does not, at all, solve any problem. The message implicitly appeals to stop this and start afresh for a solution for a peaceful and fraternal future. This message from Heaney constitutes the dictum that poetry is a criticism of life and enriches the noble aspect of this elegy.

The present poem Casualty is one of the most powerful elegies in that book. The poem is sufficiently illustrative of Heaney’s Irish poetic temper, torn between public commitments and personal freedom. Because the then political conflict of Ireland is the background of the poem, the poet’s mood, as expressed in the elegy, seems to matter much in its evaluation.

The poem is set in the northern province of Ulster in 1972, the infamous year of Bloody Sunday, when the British army killed 13 civil rights protesters in the Bogside area of Londonderry. The elegy takes the form of a kind of triptych, memorializing a regular patron of the pubs, a fisherman known to Heaney who becomes a casualty of the sectarian urban warfare in the north. Although Heaney named the man in an interview-he was Louis O’neill-he remains unnamed in the poem. This is a deliberate withholding that underscores the way the violence pulls even those who have no designated role to play, but involved rather accidentally in the matter to become a pitiful victim.

“Casualty” bears some formal resemblance to Yeats’s “Easter, 1916,” which memorializes the Easter Rising of 700 volunteers, rebels who seized areas of Dublin and held out against British forces for six days. The occasion of Heaney’s poem makes a kind of subject-rhyme with Yeats’s, as well as echoing the trimeter and its scheme of crossed-rhyming (ababcdcd). But if Heaney takes the abstract tune from Yeats to embody such figures of resistance in his own time, the man whom Heaney memorializes in his poem, is of a different stature than John MacBride in Yeats’s poem. Unlike MacBride, an executed leader of the Easter Rebellion, who deliberately involved in his tragic role in the uprising. Heaney’s pub-loving fisherman refuses to abide by a curfew in order to indulge in his nightly pint, and is killed without having assumed any significant part in the struggle.

The poet’s friend is a fisherman.

He is given no name in the poem. But the person was actually one Louis O’Neill, who was killed during the conflicts surrounding the day in the Irish history, known as ‘Bloody Sunday.’

The poet’s friend is a fisherman, an expert in his profession. He is efficient in his craft of catching fish in the deep sea. He is a hard-working worker who has to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. He is strong, steady, but shrewd. He has no political leaning or association. He believes in personal freedom and is a hard drunkard.

The end of the poet’s friend, the fisherman, occurs in an awful manner. It is his foolish fondness for wine that leads to his terrible end. Violating ‘the curfew’ imposed, he was allured to drink. But a bomb bursts thereon and his body is blown into bits.

The death of the thirteen Irish nationalists was written on the wall, as if it were a football score.

“Paras Thireen, Bogside Nil.”

That writing on the wall was done by the heartless British paratroopers.

The poet is haunted within, by the question why was his friend killed, about his culpability in the matter of his own awful death.