Seamus Heaney
(1939-2013)
Assembling Interpretation
First Mandatory Task (of Four)
Your first task: read the 10-line, single-stanza poem titled “At Toombebridge” and, in addition, study the instructor-supplied supporting materials that follow it. Seamus Heaney’s “At Toombebridge” is the first item (what we might call the threshold or incipit) in his 2001 collection, Electric Light. One purpose of the module is to demonstrate how much content and how many meanings and valences even a short poem can house. Please remember, the voice in the poem (who refers to himself as “me” in line 9) is not “Heaney” but “the speaker” (or “Heaney’s speaker”).
At Toomebridge
Opening poem in Seamus Heaney’s 2001 collection, Electric Light
10 lines • 5 sentences • (2 “paragraphs”)
Where the flat water
Came pouring over the weir out of Lough Neagh
As if it had reached an edge of the flat earth
And fallen shining to the continuous
Present of the Bann.
Where the checkpoint used to be.
Where the rebel boy was hanged in ’98.
Where negative ions in the open air
Are poetry to me. As once before
The slime and silver of the fattened eel.
Some Initial Observations
• While water settles as “flat” (l. 1), science has disproved the notion of “the flat earth” (l. 3). Before Pythagoras (who died around 495 BCE and was a member of the Ionian Greek people), the consensus Ancient Greek opinion — often identified with Homer — favored a flat, not a spherical, earth. Pythagoras’s spherical-earth theory became generally accepted, however, and both Plato’s fourth (and final) dialogue, Phaedo, and Aristotle’s treatise, On the Heavens (350 BCE), further advanced it, with the latter text providing evidence-based explanations of the phenomenon. Perhaps Ireland’s first settlers, who almost certainly harvested eels at Lough Neagh (pronounced lock nay), understood the earth as being flat.
• The sibilant (s-sound) phrase “slime and silver” (l. 10) refers to both texture and color (or light).
• In addition to using “Where” to begin three successive lines (ll. 8, 9, 10), Heaney engineers multiple instances of assonance into the poem. Consider, for example: “flat water” (l. 1); “pouring over” (l.2); “poetry to me” (l.9).
• The phrase “fattened eel” (l. 10) may imply (as an intertext) Jesus’s parable of the Prodigal Son, which appears exclusively in St. Luke’s Gospel: chapter 15; verses 11-35.
Portion of Jesus’s Prodigal Son Parable
Toome: transliteration of the Gaeilge (Irish-language) place name Tuaim
tuaim \ feminine noun (third declension) \ meaning: tumulus; burial mound; barrow
NOMINATIVE • an tuaim = “the barrow” • na tuamanna = “the barrows”
GENITIVE• na tuama = “of/belonging to the barrow” • thuama = “of/belonging to a barrow” • na dtuamanna = “of/belonging to the barrows”
Poems and stories about the origin and significance of place names (also known as toponyms) constitute a discrete genre in Gaeilge (Irish-language) literature: dinnseanchas (“lore of place”). “At Toomebridge” can be regarded as a lyric within an English-language version of that Irish tradition. (Incidentally, toponymy or toponomastics, the study of place names, is a branch of onomastics, the study of proper names.)
Seamus Heaney discusses dinnseanchas early in his 1977 lecture, “The Sense of Place”:
I think there are two ways in which place is known and cherished, two ways which may be complementary but which are just likely to be antipathetic. One is lived, illiterate, and unconscious; the other learned, literate, and conscious. In the literary sensibility, both are likely to co-exist …. [I]n Irish poetry there is a whole genre of writing called dinnseanchas, poems and tales which relate to the original meanings of place names and constitute a form of mythological etymology.
Some years earlier — specifically, in a 1973 television interview (with Patrick Garland) — Heaney opined that he saw his home territory, Toomebridge and environs, not as “the Irish landscape” in some grand sense but, instead, as “a place that I know is ordinary” and “can lay my hands on.” Addressing the task of composing poems about that place, Heaney continued, “[W]ords come alive and get a kind of personality when they’re involved with it.” Heaney’s inspirations for interrogating his native ground include the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh (like Heaney, from Ulster, Ireland’s northern province) and the American poet Robert Frost.
… the continuous
Present of the Bann.
(lines 4 and 5)
In English grammar, the continuous present tense combines the conjugated-present-tense form of “to be” and the continuous (“-ing”) aspect of another verb. For example: “I am reading”; “She is working”; “They are meditating.” The continuous present is also known as: (1) the present continuous; (2) the present progressive; (3) the present imperfect.
Gaeilge (the Irish language) renders the River Bann as An Bhanna: “the river goddess” (Ban [“woman”] + Dia [“deity”]). The river flows from the SE to the NW of Northern Ireland. It passes through Lough Neagh, with the inflow portion south of the lake being called the Upper Bann and the outflow portion north of the lake (beginning at Toomebridge and discharging into the Atlantic Ocean) being called the Lower Bann.
Lough Neagh is the largest freshwater lake in the archipelago commonly known as Britain and Ireland (and historically known as the British Isles).
Assembling Interpretation: Sexual Valences
Various elements of “At Toomebridge” suggest sex. Indeed, some literary critics assert that if one interprets “Neagh” (l. 2) as masculine and “Bann” (l. 5) as feminine, the first five lines could be read (in a masculinist way?) as a description of male sexual climax.
The name Lough Neagh may honor a being from Ireland’s Tuatha Dé Danann mythological tradition, the Dagda (or “good god”): a giant-sized father-figure associated with fertility, agriculture, and druidic knowledge and power.
The feminine inheres in “the continuous \ Present of the Bann” (ll. 4-5) or river goddess, while — arguably — the masculine inheres in the phallic resonances of “[t]he slime and silver of the fattened eel” (l. 10).
Complicating the above interpretation is the Greek philosopher Aristotle’s famous contention that the eel isn’t procreative but, instead, springs up spontaneously from “the so-called earth’s guts.” According to Aristotle’s Historia Animalium (“History of Animals”), “[t]he eel is neither male nor female and can engender nothing.” One notes, in addition, that the sole human the poem’s speaker invokes is not a sexually capable man but a “boy” (l. 7) — and a dead boy at that. Furthermore, the environment tends towards the policing and punishment of desire: “the [military] checkpoint” (l. 6); the boy’s “[being] hanged” (l. 7). Indeed, the toponym Toome not only sounds like “tomb” but also derives from the Irish-language word for a barrow or burial mound.
Where the checkpoint used to be.
Where the rebel boy was hanged in ’98.
(lines 6 and 7)
1798: The United Irish Rebellion
Popularly referred to as ’98, the United Irish Rebellion rendered the year 1798 the bloodiest in Irish history. Spearheading the months-long insurrection, the Society of the United Irishmen sought to replace British colonial control over Ireland with an independent nation: a sovereign republic. The society’s foremost ideologue, Theobald Wolfe Tone (a Protestant Dublin lawyer), insisted on “break[ing] the [political] connection with England.” He expressed the movement’s goal as follows: “To unite the whole people of Ireland, to abolish the memory of all past dissensions, and to substitute the common name of Irishman in the place of the denominations of Protestant [Anglican/Episcopalian], Catholic, and Dissenter [Presbyterian].”
Inspired by the American and French Revolutions, Presbyterian merchants established the Society of the United Irishmen during a 1791 Belfast meeting. In Ulster (Ireland’s northern province), the rebellion of 1798 found a leader in a 30-year-old Presbyterian, Henry Joy McCracken, from a family of prominent Belfast industrialists. On June 6, 1798, McCracken ordered Ulster’s United Irish rebels to rise, and the following day saw approximately 4,000 of them leave their encampment on Donegore Hill to attack the yeoman garrison in Antrim Town, four-and-a-half miles to the west. Another set of rebels targeted Randalstown, a little further west (see the map below). Having forced a contingent of yeomanry there to surrender, they marched to Toome, where they partially destroyed the bridge over the River Bann in order to impede anticipated British attempts to move Belfast-based troops into middle and west Ulster.
The British captured McCracken on June 7, 1798, and they hanged him for treason in Belfast on July 17. The video (3:19) in this section features the Irish folk singer Tommy Makem’s rendition of “Roddy McCorley,” a ballad — written in the late 1890s by Ethna Carbery (also known as Anna MacManus) — about one of McCracken’s followers. Most likely, McCorley is the individual who Heaney’s poem invokes as “the rebel boy [who] was hanged [at Toomebridge] in ’98.” Little definitive information exists about McCorley, but Carbery’s lyric brought about his emplacement as a martyr in the Irish nationalist imagination. Questions persist as to his religion (Presbyterian or Catholic), but we know that his execution occurred in late February 1800 (not in 1798).
Video (3:19): Tommy Makem sings “Roddy McCorley”
A portion of a letter from Ballymena — dated March 2, 1800 — published in the March 7, 1800, edition of the Belfast Newsletter, a newspaper antithetical to the United Irish cause:
Upon Friday last a most awful procession took place here, namely, the escorting of Roger McCorley, who was lately convicted at a court martial, to the place of execution, Toome Bridge, the unfortunate man having been bred in that neighbourhood. As a warning to others it is proper to observe that the whole course of his life was devoted to disorderly proceedings of every kind …. His body was given up to dissection, and after words [sic] buried under the gallows.
Seamus Heaney was born and reared on a farm (Mossbawn) near Castledawson. Later is his youth, the family inherited and moved to a different farm (The Wood), near Bellaghy. His remains are buried in the graveyard beside Bellaghy’s Roman Catholic church. Ballaghy emerged during the seventeenth-century Plantation of Ulster: a planned town within the territory that England’s King James I granted to a London trade association, the Worshipful Company of Vintners (i.e wine merchants). In common with many towns in Ulster, Bellaghy features a “diamond” or central square.
Not Invoked in “At Toomebridge”: The US World War II Army Air Force Base
“It is Co. Derry in the early 1940s. The American bombers groan towards the aerodrome at Toomebridge; the American troops maneuver in the fields along the road; but all of that great historical action does not disturb the rhythms of the yard [at the Heaney family’s farm].” — Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1966-1978 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980) p. 17 • The text first appeared in 1978, as an essay, “Omphalos,” narrated by Heaney, on BBC Radio 4.
As World War II intensified, Britain’s Royal Air Force constructed a three-runway airbase (RAF Toome) near Toomebridge. In mid-1943, the British handed the facility over to the American military, and on August 23, 1943, it became No. 3 Combat Crew Replacement Center under the US Army’s 8th Air Force Composite Command. For almost a year and a half, the base trained up to 100 crews at a time to fly twin-engined A-20 Havoc and B-26 Marauder bombers.
The Troubles (1969-1998): British Army Checkpoints
Reflecting on living in Belfast as a young married man, Heaney wrote (in an essay, “Christmas, 1971,” published in The Listener magazine in 1971), “[W]e have to live with the [British] Army. … It hasn’t been named martial law but that’s what it feels like. Everywhere soldiers with cocked guns are watching you — that’s what they’re here [in Northern Ireland] for — on the streets, at the corners of streets, from doorways, over the puddles on demolished sites. At night, [military] jeeps and armored cars groan past without lights; or road-blocks are thrown up, and once again it’s delays measured in hours, searches and signings among the guns and torches. As you drive away, you bump over ramps that are specially designed to wreck you at speed and maybe get a glimpse of a couple of youths with hands on their heads being frisked on the far side of the road. Just routine.” (Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1966-1978 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980) pp. 30-31.)
… negative ions in the open air
(line 8)
Ions are atoms or molecules that bear an electrical charge: a positive ion (or cation) has lost one or more electrons, while a negative ion (or anion) has gained one or more electrons. Believed by many to be beneficial to human health, negative ions occur copiously around moving water (e.g., sea surf, waterfalls, weirs). One might legitimately inquire as to why Heaney uses the term “negative ions” (l. 8), as opposed to the more economical term “anions.” A possible explanation is desire on Heaney’s part to evoke in the reader’s mind "negative capability,” an important concept that John Keats, an English Romantic poet, advanced in a December 1817 letter to his brothers, George and Tom. One notes that the critic Henry Hart has asserted, “Keats was Heaney’s original poetic father.” Keats would become somewhat familiar with Ulster; a walking tour there in 1818 caused him to comment, in rather political terms, on “the worse than nakedness, the rags, the dirt and misery, of the poor common Irish.”
Keats explained to his brothers, “Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Citing Shakespeare as an example, Keats associated this quality with “[Men] of Achievement, especially in Literature.” In essence, negative capability means that one is comfortable with not possessing a logical, factual explanation for every last thing one feels or encounters.
Keats formulated the idea of negative capability during the period of transition in Western thought from the era known as the Enlightenment (Age of Reason; Long Eighteenth Century) to that known as Romanticism. Broadly speaking, the Enlightenment emphasized “the head” (e.g., rationally conducting scientific experiments to determine facts); by contrast, Romanticism emphasized “the heart” (e.g., affectively or emotionally engaging with nature, as well as with spiritual, sexual, and national desire). Having trained as a doctor (at Guy’s Hospital, London), Keats had first-hand knowledge of rational, scientific analysis and practice.
Keats’s letter presents several additional terms worth noting. It advocates that we be open to “the Penetralium [i.e. innermost part] of mystery” when experiencing and reacting to the world. Such openness, the letter claims, will reveal “fine verisimilitude” or accurate truth without the need for “fact & reason.” Some weeks before the letter to his brothers, Keats expressed a similar sentiment when corresponding with a friend, Benjamin Bailey. Wondering “how any thing can be know for truth by consequitive [i.e. consecutive or logical] reasoning,” he exclaimed, “O for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts.”
In an 1984 lecture (“Place and Displacement: Recent Poetry of Northern Ireland”), Heaney seems to allude to Keats’s conceit of negative capability: “[T]he poet is stretched between politics and transcendence, and is often displaced from a confidence in a single position by his disposition to be affected by all positions, negatively rather than positively capable” (emphases added). A decade earlier (in a lecture titled “The Fire i’ the Flint”), he explicitly identified Keats as a poet who combined a “nervous apprehension of phenomena” — that is, a highly sensitive openness to nature — with an “ability to translate [the] nervous energy into [poetic] phrases.”
… poetry to me. As once before
The slime and silver of the fattened eel.
(lines 9 and 10)
The European eel is spawned in the Sargasso Sea, near the Bahamas. As leptocephali — that is, tiny, transparent larvae (shaped like willow leaves) — the juveniles begin to drift eastwards, on the current of the Gulf Stream, across the North Atlantic Ocean, a journey that can take between seven month and three years. Near Europe’s continental shelf, their bodies become cylindrical, a condition known as the “glass eel” stage. Upon reaching brackish water at the mouths of such European rivers as the Bann, the glass eels gain pigment and, thus, become elvers.
The elvers swim upstream — or even move across wet land — to the body of water (e.g., Lough Neagh) that will serve as their most long-term home. In that location, they mature into the “yellow eel” stage, gaining size and laying on fat reserves. After five to twenty years, a Lough Neagh eel will, as a “silver eel,” exit the lake, reenter the open Atlantic, and — relying on its stored fat for fuel — propel itself 3,000 miles or so back to the Sargasso Sea. Once at its destination, it will complete the development of its reproductive organs and breed for the only time in its life. Soon after, it will die.
Academic Article
Winifred E. Frost • “The Eel Fisheries of the River Bann, Northern Ireland, and Observations on the Age of the Silver Eels” • ICES Journal of Marine Science • Volume 16, Number 3, July 1950, Pages 358-383
“The fisheries for silver eels ( Anguilla anguilla L.) on the River Bann, Northern Ireland, are probably the largest of their kind in western Europe.”
Newspaper Feature
2019 Irish Times piece, “‘I know how much the eel suppers mean to people here’: Keeping the Traditions Going”
Video (0:47): a River Bann eel fisherman discusses his trade
Cooking eel • Never consume raw eel, for the creature’s blood contains a toxic, muscle-cramping protein. Experimenting with eel blood caused a Parisian doctor, Charles Robert Richet, to gain important insights into the phenomenon of anaphylaxis — work that earned him the 1913 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine.
Although it doesn’t cite any Irish examples when discussing eels, the Penguin Guide to the Superstitions of Britain and Ireland (London: Penguin, 2003) highlights the belief that they “are generated spontaneously from horse hairs in water,” as well as the misconception that they congregate together into “massive knots that [can] only be untied by thunder” (p. 161).
In Irish Heritage (Dundalk, Ireland: Dundalgan Press, 1942), the anthropologist E. Estyn Evans notes, “[T]he present eel-weir at Toome, with its wattled lanes, probably had a not very different forerunner on the same site in prehistoric days” (p. 29).
“Eelworks” (2010)
Heaney’s 2010 collection, Human Chain, contains a poem titled “Eelworks.” Here are some extracts. Note: “selkie” is a creature in Scottish folklore, having the appearance of a seal but the ability to assume human form.
The “fish factor’s house” refers to the home of the Devlin family, whose daughter, Marie, he would marry. The Devlins were connected with the eel-fishing and -exporting industry.
•••
“For me, the first to come a-courting
In the fish factor’s house,
It [a necessary task] was to eat with them
An eel supper.
On the [fishing] line, not the utter
Flip-stream frolic-fish
But a foot-long
Slither of a fellow,
A young eel, greasy grey
And rightly wriggle-spined,
Not yet the blueblack
Slick-backed waterwork
I’d live to reckon with
My old familiar
Pearl-purl
Selkie-streaker.
On the hoarding and the signposts
”Lough Neagh Fishermen’s Co-operative,”
But ever on our lips and at the weir
”The eelworks.”
Image courtesy of National Geographic Society
A Lough Neagh Sequence (1969)
Seamus Heaney’s second collection of poetry, Door into the Dark (1969), contains a group of seven poems, A Lough Neagh Sequence (originally published as a pamphlet). Each poem has a discrete title: (1) “Up the Shore”; (2) “Beyond Sargasso”; (3) “Bait”; (4) “Setting”; (5) “Lifting”; (6) “The Return”; (7) “Vision.” Among other topics, the sequence addresses eel fishers, eel fishing, and the fishing rights on Lough Neagh. The second poem presents a young male eel as “transparent, a muscled icicle,” arriving in Lough Neagh from the Sargasso Sea. For its part, the sixth poem centers on a female eel, near her life’s end, en route from the Lough to the Sea. She seems “a wick that is \ its own taper and light.”
Image (courtesy of Menapia Research + Education): The “hoarding” to which the conclusion of Heaney’s 2010 poem “Eelworks” refers.
Second Mandatory Test (of Four)
Your second task: listen to a 30-minute podcast titled “The Real and the Imaginary,” first aired in 2009 (and re-aired in May 2021) by Lyric FM, one of the radio stations of RTÉ, Ireland’s national broadcaster. It was created and presented by Eoin O. Kelly with the purpose of highlighting some of Heaney’s spoken-word contributions to RTÉ, as collected in that organization’s sound archives.
One could title this podcast “Heaney on Heaney.” It offers some highlights of Heaney’s development as a poet, from rural Northern Ireland, where he was born and grew up, to the publication of his collection, The Haw Lantern (1987). In 1995, Heaney would become the fourth Irish author to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Among other matters, the piece addresses: Heaney’s early efforts to find his authentic voice as a poet; his time, in 1970, as a visiting professor of literature at the University of California Berkeley; and his negotiations with The Troubles, an extended period of ethno-sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland. To access the podcast, click here or, alternatively, the icon immediately above.
Please note: This podcast is the basis of the Write Now homework exercise about Heaney. (See Fourth Mandatory Task towards the bottom of this webpage.)
Third Mandatory Task (of Four)
Your third task: study the instructional content — a written version of the lectures about Heaney.
To make the lecture content abundantly clear, your instructor has created a PDF containing a written version of the multi-day presentation, plus a number of relevant images. You can access the material here: Written Account of Heaney Lectures. The PDF is also available by clicking the gold bar immediately below.
EXAM WORDS
Irish Nobel laureates in literature: Yeats; Shaw; Beckett; Heaney ••• Lough Neagh (associated with The Dagda or “good god”): eels; flax (linen) ••• “Sunlight”: Mary Heaney ••• “Mid-Term Break”: brother Christopher, killed at age four by a car ••• “Digging”: breakthrough poem, published in New Statesman magazine (and Death of a Naturalist poetry collection) ••• Mossbawn farm, Castledawson; The Wood farm, Bellaghy ••• Wife: Marie Devlin ••• St. Columb’s College in city of Derry/Londonderry ••• QUB: Incertus; The Group; Philip Hobsbaum ••• University of California Berkeley: Thomas Flanagan; Hiberno-centric ••• Harvard: Helen Vendler; Boylston Professor ••• Derek Walcott ••• Homes in Republic of Ireland: County Wicklow; and Sandymount (Dublin suburb) ••• Unionist; Loyalist; Orange; Ulster-Scots; Stormont ••• Prince William of Orange; Battle of the Boyne; commemorated on The Twelfth (July 12) ••• Nationalist; Republican; Taig; Shinner ••• Irish Free State ••• Kirk; boortree; farl ••• Nine Years’ War ••• King James VI (Scotland) and I (England): escheated (adjective); plant (verb); diamond (noun); bawn (noun) ••• Francis Hutcheson: unalienable rights ••• The Honorable the Irish Society; Vintners’ Company ••• 1641 Rebellion and Depositions; Portadown Bridge Massacre (Eleanor Price) ••• 36th Ulster Division of British Army; Battle of the Somme (World War I) ••• The Troubles (1968-1998) ••• Bombings: Dublin and Monaghan in 1974; Grand Hotel, Brighton, in 1984 ••• NICRA ••• Bloody Sunday (1972): “PARAS THIRTEEN … BOGSIDE NIL” ••• P.V. Glob, The Bog People; the Bog Poems, such as “The Tollund Man” ••• Murder of Colum McCartney, Heaney’s second cousin: “The Strand at Lough Beg” (echoes Milton’s “Lycidas,” a pastoral elegy) ••• Dead men from Bellaghy in Station Island: Colum McCartney (“saccharined” murder); William Strathearn; Francis Hughes ••• Bobby Sands; hunger strikes in Maze prison’s H-Blocks ••• Translations: Beowulf (Old English or Anglo-Saxon); Sophocles’s Philoctetes (Ancient Greek) ••• dinnseanchas; toponomastics; onomastics; An Tuaim = the barrow (root of Toome) ••• An Bhanna = the goddess ••• 1798 Rebellion: Society of the United Irishmen; Northern Star; Pikemen; Croppies; Theobald Wolfe Tone; Roddy McCorley (Ethna Carbery) ••• James Steile; Neill O’Quinn ••• Prodigal Son (Luke’s Gospel): “fatted calf” ••• John Keats: Negative Capability ••• Aristotle (Historia Animalium); Tiresias (blind seer; lifespan of seven lives) ••• Eels: lepocephali; glass; elvers; yellow; silver
Fourth Mandatory Task (of Four)
Your fourth task: complete and submit — via Folio, before the deadline — the single Write Now (i.e. written homework) exercise about the Heaney-centered podcast. Refer to your syllabus and/or the course Folio page to check the submission deadline. No late work is accepted.
There are 10 questions, presented in listening order. In other words: the questions chronologically track the RTÉ Lyric FM podcast The Real and the Imaginary, which traces highlights of Heaney’s life and career by means of archival radio pieces, mainly in the poet’s own voice. When attempting the questions, it’s advisable NOT to begin with Folio but instead to: (1) download a PDF containing the 10 Write Now questions as a single document (also available via the green bar below); and then (2) answer each question-set in a Microsoft Word document, which you should save as you proceed. That way, you’ll always have proof that you completed the exercise, even if Folio goes down or otherwise doesn’t cooperate. When you have finished the entire Write Now exercise, you should review it carefully, save it again, and then submit it via Folio — either as a Microsoft Word document or a PDF — before the firm deadline. The ability to submit ceases at that time, and effort not received before the deadline earns a grade of zero. Another way of saying the above: late submission isn’t possible. Remember, please, that your grade depends not just on correct responses but also: complete sentences; good grammar; accurate spelling; and clear expression.
Please be very mindful of the following statements, which appear on the course syllabus.
Do your own work. Students may not collaborate on the production of responses to Write Now quizzes (i.e. homework exercises). When grading, we pay close attention to similarities between submissions. A student found to have copied or otherwise relied on another student’s work (on even one occasion) — or found to have committed plagiarism — will receive an “F” for the entire course and, in addition, will be reported to the University for a hearing that may result in suspension or expulsion from GS.
Stacks of turf dry atop the bog.
Heaney wears his father’s coat and hat,
while holding his ashplant (walking stick).