How has Seamus Heaney's childhood affected his poetry?

Authors Avatar

How has Seamus Heaney’s childhood affected his poetry?

        Seamus Heaney was born in the North of Ireland in 1939 on a farm with his mother and father and nine other siblings. Generally Heaney’s poems are influenced by animals through his childhood experience, specifically within ‘The Early Purges’ and ‘An Advancement of Learning’. Heaney grew up near Belfast, during the time of ‘The Troubles’, the Irish civil war. Although Heaney left at the height of the war, it is obvious his work reflects his experiences of that time. For an example ‘The Early Purges’ illustrates this. “Where they consider death unnatural”. Growing into an environment where Heaney will appreciate that death does exist, the extract interprets killing to be artificial. Many of Heaney’s early poems dealt with experiences of childhood and a frequent theme is how these experiences affect us.

One poem that deals with a childhood experience is “The Early Purges”. The title immediately suggests that the poem is about getting rid of undesirables. It is about a particular incident and how we lose innocence, describing the effects of Heaney witnessing the killing of “frail” and “tiny” kittens. The words, “Soft paws scraping like mad” suggests how helpless and vulnerable the kittens are; they are so small that they are unable to climb out of the bucket. The word, “soft” indicates a feeling of guilt about destroying the helpless kittens. The kittens are made to seem innocent and vulnerable through the language used. The words, “frail metal sound” and “tiny din” imply that the kittens don’t make enough noise to be significant. They are only small and powerless. Metal cannot be described as frail but the kittens illustrate this. Also din cannot be expressed as tiny, but in this case it can be used because the kittens are making as much noise as possible. They seem weak and terrified.

Join now!

Heaney uses words such as, “purges”, “the water pumped in”, “scraggy wee shits”, “dunghill” and “dung” to suggest that the kittens seem like waste. The title reflects the idea of waste, as the word “purges” means getting rid of undesirables. “The water pumped in,” indicates what happens when flushing a toilet, therefore getting rid of waste. Dan Taggart calls the kittens, “scraggy wee shits” which shows that he doesn’t care about the killing of the kittens and treats them as waste to be got rid of. He justifies his actions by suggesting the kittens have no value. A “dunghill” can ...

This is a preview of the whole essay