SEAMUS HEANEY

*EARLY POEMS (UP TO 1969)*

DIGGING

-The tone is serious and full of reflection. The speaker is looking back through the family history,
noting how hard his father and his grandfather have worked the land. He is in awe of their
achievements yet resigned to the fact that he, as creator of the poem, is destined not to follow them
and their digging

-There is no set rhyme scheme for Digging, no established pattern of end rhymes. The only full
rhymes occur in lines 3 and 4, sound/ground, but these are what might be called accidental because
they are not a part of a scheme. The rounded vowels do however underline the importance of the
father's use of the spade.

-There is no set regular metre in this poem although tetrameter, four beats per line, and pentameter
lines dominate, especially pentameter, five beats per line. This steady core parallels the action of the
digger, steady and without extremes

Repeating certain words and phrases in a poem gives the reader a clear message of importance and
emphasis. It can also be an echo of the action taking place, in this case that of digging, which is most
definitely repetitive

-as his ancestors used the spade to dig and work into their lifes, the poet now uses the pen to do the
same, it's his metaphorical spade

DEATH OF A NATURALIST

-Heaney looks back to a time when he was a boy initially enthralled by the local flax-dam, an area of
boggy water in his native County Derry, Northern Ireland. The first person speaker concentrates on
the resident frog population and the frog life-cycle. But as the poem progresses the speaker's
viewpoint alters. the once fascinating frogs become a threat, the language changes radically to
reflect this and begins to create tension within the poem.

-The two stanzas are highly contrasting. The first is full of positive delight as the boy observes and is
fascinated by the frogs and frogspawn of the flax-dam. The second brings fear and loathing as the
male frogs invade with their coarse croaking and belligerent menace. There is a parallel between the
life cycle of the frog and the development of the boy; here is an innocent child changing into a young
adolescent, a world of delight and innocence transformed into one that threatens and disgusts.

-written in blank verse, traditionally a form associated with iambic pentameter, that is, five iambic
feet in each line

-This change in language reflects the change in the boy as innocence is lost and adolescence begins
to kick in. It could be that the use of cocked, pulsed, slap, plop, grenades, blunt, farting, sickened,
slime and vengeance reflects this physical and emotional/hormonal change from childhood into
puberty.

-There is a definite shift in tone, the child is no longer lost in innocence, wide-eyed in wonder at the
frog's life cycle. The child has gone. Life has altered irrevocably. The child knows this and will not dip
his hand into the spawn anymore.

REQUIEM FOR THE CROPPIES

- the “croppies” were Catholic peasants from rural communities that organized themselves into an
army to rebel against their Protestant suppressor. Seamus Heaney’s poem “Requiem for the
Croppies” is a tribute to Irish rebels of the late eighteenth century who resisted English domination
of their country. The poem is about the defeat of the Croppies at Vinegar hill in 1798

-The poem both opens and closes with the image of barley. This is the small amount that the fighters
have gathered and that they devote their pockets to. It is closely related to them, an image of their
native environment, and their reason for fighting

-The opening two lines of the poem indicate the nomadic lifestyle of the rebels, who must carry
food, in the form of barley, in their coats and who have “No kitchens on the run” and few if any
possibilities of setting up permanent camps show that the rebels were disorganized and hurried.
Here, Heaney is stripping heroism down to its essentials -an idea and an action.

-We see personification of the hillside that blushed. Here, the hillside is named and is coloured with
the blood. It is the actions of the fighters that words are devoted to, not their thoughts

-In the poem’s final lines, the speaker brings the work full-circle, explaining how the barley seeds
carried by the Irish eventually blossomed, out of the Irish graves, into new-born barley plants. Thus,
in the closing line (the “barley grew upout of the grave”) the symbol of the countryside and the
image of their struggle is left behind them. The barley, which the Croppies carried, grew into a crop
at their grave, which was burned down by the Anglo-Protestants.The words “the barley grew up out
of our grave” show that despite, being set on fire, the barley still grew back. This symbolizes the
determined “we’ll be back” nature of the Irish, who do not give in easily
**BOG POEMS (FROM NORTH 1974)**

BOGLAND

-Bogland is one of many poems Heaney composed on the subject of Irish identity and its relation to
the past. Heaney turns the peat bog into a metaphor for memory and feeling, a place where identity
is buried and preserved. The speaker is not personally involved in this poem - there is no first person
I - but rather takes an overview of the land and the history.

-The poem with its narrow stanza on stanza form mirrors the bog itself, layer upon layer of peat,
layers of language, both descriptive and figurative. Bogland is a poem of contrast and comparison,
initially between the north American plain with its vastness and the enclosed narrowness of the Irish
bog. It's as if the speaker is attempting to clarify the landscape he loves and knows by acknowledging
the past, how the bog preserves things and memory, how mythology still clings to the present

-Many things end up buried in the peat bog including the Great Irish Elk, a creature that lived
thousands of years ago (Megaloceros giganteus) which had huge antlers and is now in a museum

-Butter is homely, locally produced and represents both farming community and a sense of place.
The bog keeps it, acting like a time capsule. The very ground is black butter, a metaphor for the soft,
perhaps deceptive lifestyles led by the people

-The bog is still worked by those who sense new things arising from it, but the island has such a long
history of invasion and settlement, it's as if there is no pristine land left

THE GRAUBALLE MAN

-allegorical poem that conveys the political crisis and regional warfare happened in Northern Ireland.
During this time period known as “The Troubles”, violent and animosity erupted. Noticing the
brutality and adversary, Seamus Heaney figuratively utilises the context of The Troubles and elicits
his message towards the act of brutality

-seamus offers vast and rich descriptions of the bog body, describing everything he sees but at the
same time horrified by the thought of this man being brutally sacrificed

-"From that moment the problem of poetry moved from being simply a matter of achieving the
satisfactory verbal icon to being a search for images and symbols adequate to our predicament.[...] I
mean that I felt it imperative to discover a field of force in which, without abandoning fidelity to the
processes and experience of poetry as I have outlined them, it would be possible to encompass the
perspectives of a humane reason and at the same time to grant the religious intensity of the
violence its deplorable authenticity and complexity." "The question as ever is 'How with this rage
shall beauty hold a plea?' And my answer is, by offering 'befitting emblems of adversity.'"

BOG QUEEN

-The violent exploitation of Ireland caused by England during The Troubles is the main premise
within Seamus Heaney’s poem, “Bog Queen”. The poem wrestles with resistance and historical
prejudice. Heaney elicits visceral images depicting the resurrection of an ornately dressed female
bog body

-Prior to the passage indicated above, the poem elaborately describes the physical body of the bog
woman (from the voice of the bog queen) being uncovered by the turfcutter who pays his respects
to the woman after this abrupt discovery. However, through a bribe he betrays the bog queen,
leaving her to rise and seek vengeance on those who have betrayed her in the past

-The violent tone married with the language signify that the bog queen represents Ireland.
Furthermore, the prior mistreatment by England (and betrayal by some Irishmen) serves as the
beginning of the rise of the Irish to regain equality. Through tone, and symbolic language, Seamus
Heaney’s poem “Bog Queen” uses the exploitation of Ireland to argue that historical prejudice serves
as the stepping-stone for resistance of a culture against external forces

-Since the bog woman stands for Ireland, a country that was culturally assaulted by England this line
(46) empathizes with the turbulent treatment of the bog woman by trying to repair the damage
through replacing her in her original state

-the noun, “birth-cord” solidifies the natural connection between the woman and her motherland.
Her hair serves has the umbilical cord between her and her land

-Not only does the cutting of the braid signify historical prejudice against the woman/Ireland, but
also it allows the woman/Ireland to stand up and resist any further exploitation of the land that is
home

PUNISHMENT

-Punishment is one of Seamus Heaney's poems that explores the nature of violence and revenge
within society. It focuses specifically on a body that has been buried in a peat bog for around 2000
years. When Heaney wrote the poem the body (known as the Windeby Girl) was thought to have
been ritually killed. Her hair had been shaved, a band covered her eyes and a halter (rope) was tight
around the neck. an adulteress as heaney says
-(Subsequent investigation with cutting edge technology has shown that the body is actually that of
a teenage boy)

-Heaney uses the bog in a metaphorical sense and parallels the death of the bog person (who he
took to be female) with the punishments handed out to modern girls by the IRA (Irish Republican
Army) during the Troubles in his native Northern Ireland. These girls were shaved, stripped, covered
in tar and feathers and tied to railings in Belfast for being too friendly to British troops

-The speaker progresses with more descriptive language of the girl's head (like corn stubble,
blackened by age.) This simile connects the girl to the land through the idea of a field within a bigger
landscape

-Heaney, a minority Catholic, born in Northern Ireland, was caught in between. As a poet, an artist,
he had to navigate his way through the sectarian troubles as they raged on through the latter part of
the 20th century. The betraying sisters are the modern girls who get punished for keeping the
company of British soldiers. They are equivalents to the bog girl; they suffer similar punishments, yet
are spared their lives. The speaker remains dumb as these atrocities are carried out, but is outraged
that is he secretly allows something bad to happen

**LATE POEMS (LATE 1980s)

TERMINUS

-terminus just reflects the set of contradictions that seamus had to face from an early age. terminus
is the name of the roman god of boundaries, able to look in both directions, something that heaney
thought a poet should aspire to

-he represents in this poem the collision of both worlds: traditional and modern, man-made and
organic