Seminar 4

Poem analysis: “Gifts of rain“ Seamus Heany

1. Title: figurative, rain can not give us any gifts.

2. Theme/Mood

Theme:
the poem tells about  the stages of the river in which it suggests the development of the river
from it's source to where it gets strong.

The man survives by going along with nature and resisiting it.

Mood:

The poem is thought-provoking, it makes me feel worried and it forces me to think about the life
and its transience(швидкоплинність)

3. Thematic structure.

The poem is divided into 4 partss. The first part is about prolonged rainfall associated with
bounty(the gifts of rain). In the second part the human presense is added. Adulthood, on the
contrary, before it is even reconstructed as what is referred to by the second part of the section, is
characterized by absence and loss. A man wading lost fields. In the third part author sets out the
subtly different sounds he grew to recognize. Rising water levels in his familiar neighbourhood
river were distinctive. Childhood is presented, mutatis mutandis, in a traditional romantic way as
the time of plenitude and harmony. With Wordsworth, the poet could almost declare: "nature
then (...) / To me was all in all". Childhood was the time when fears could be eased because
everything in Nature was meaningful and the elders knew how to decipher the messages of the
rain and of the Moyola.

The first section of the poem has no direction and the rhythm is irregular. This suggests that the
rain may come unexpectedly and starts off somewhat jaggedly. The rest of the poem flows and
has rhythm and there is regularity in each section. This mimics the movement as the rain as it
comes down from the clouds.

4. Symbols/ allusions:

These 4 sections could symbolise the stages of life which consists of birth, childhood, adulthood
and death. It could also symbolise the stages of the river in which it suggests the development of
the river from it's source to where it gets strong. Or of course, it could symbolise the stages of the
water cycle. Water is the symbol of life, but i can also be seen as purity, freshness or youth. In
this mysterious poem, Heaney takes a simple view of life and it seems almost documentary-like.
The title of the poem 'Gifts of Rain' gives it a positive feeling, but although water has it's positive
aspects such as lifegiving and growth, it also has it's negative aspects, such as being dangerous or
even deadly.

Moyola- the local river of Heaney’s childhood, which was the source of his initiation into
music,sounds.
Water is the symbol of life, and it can also can be seen as purity, freshness and youth.

5. Lyrical hero.

Lyical hero of the poem is a man who destrozs the glassy,waterlogged surface by his
movement( breaks the pane of flood). The turbulence he causes throws up an image of beauty( a
flower of mud-/water blooms up to his reflection) that dissolves into an image of injury like a
cut-swaying like a beautiful country uglified by warring fictions. This Ulster countryman, and
via him the poet, the nation cannot change his, their instinctive responses to cope with
waterlogged extremes. His hands grub/where the spade has uncustled/sunken drills.Even walking
in water he struggles to maintain his critical relationship with his environment.

6. Rhythm/rhyme.

The lay-out of the poem on the printed page, on the other hand, shows that each part is further
divided into smaller textual units, stanzas or verse paragraphs:

Section I: not regular at all; marked by abrupt ruptures; the layout indicates a division into two
verse paragraphs, the second one beginning with "A nimble snout of flood..."

Section II: a good deal more regular; the section is presented as a sequence of 7 pairs of lines,
which could be described as free distichs. Note that two-line stanzas are not traditional, and that
14 lines altogether cannot but evoke the length of a sonnet.

Section III: six quatrains, which makes section III the longest and, as far as the visible lay-out is
concerned, the most regular and traditional. Kinship, which could be read as a structural and
thematic development of Gifts of Rain, is made of 6 sections of 6 quatrains each

Section IV: four tercets; a compromise between II and III? A three-line stanza is unsual, unless
combined with a strict rhyme-scheme (terza rima), or part of the sestet in a sonnet.

1. End-rhymes
There is no rhyming pattern, but a number of end-rhymes are to be found. Their being scarce and
irregular may sometimes confer a great force of emphasis to them:
2. Lexical repetitions
Leaving out those words already mentioned as rhyming repeatedly (mud, flood, ear), we note
quite a large number of words repeated:
"fords" (I, 8) / "ford" (III, 3)
"over" (I, 7) / "overflowed" (III, 12)
"sounding" (I, 9) / "Soundings" (I, 9) / "sound" (IV, 10)
"water" (II, 4) / "water" (IV, 1)
"ground" (II, 12) / "ground" (IV, 12)
"cropping" (II, 14) / "crops" (III, 23)
"the Moyola" (III, 8) / "Moyola" (IV, 2)
"beds" (III, 9) / "bedding" (IV, 4)
"calling" (III, 16) / "call" (IV, 10)
Each of these repetitions plays a part in the weaving together of the different elements of the text
into a cohesive whole. Particularly forceful in itself is that found at the end of section I
(sounding/Soundings), though its effects is not one of cohesion. Note, too, the positional
importance of "ground" as last word of the final section.