Than any other man on Toner’s bog’
The way the lyrical way he writes about his father and grandfather’s digging ‘exalt the everyday miracles’ of an ordinary daily task.
Heaney believes that poetry should have energy and passion and chooses the right words that also configure up beautiful images. He uses similes e.g. ‘snug as a gun’ and alliteration, e.g. ‘gravelly ground’. This type of languages makes the poem more effective to the reader or listener. He also uses strong physical images to convey his ideas e.g. ‘his straining rump’, and ‘the coarse boot nestled on the lug’, and chooses words that appeal to the sense to make his poems vivid, ‘the cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge’.
The theme of ‘An advancement of learning’ is like ‘Digging’, referring back to childhood, ‘the exalted past’. The poem is written in the first person and tells how Heaney met a rat which walking by a river. At first he is terrified, and remembers the panic he used to feel when he and saw rats in his home and yard. Halfway through the poem, the poet confronts his fears and stares the rat out who eventually retreats. This experience of confronting a rat and winning helps Seamus Heaney to learn how to handle fear and overcome it, so that is why it is called ‘An advancement of learning’. The poem is made up of nine verses of four lines each. Each line is short which contributes towards the tension. There is an ethical element in this poem because he knows he had done the right thing.
The poem uses very powerful language and rhythm to create the tension and the fear and at the same time Heaney uses words of great beauty.
In the first two verses, Heaney conveys the peacefulness of the scene by the description of the river, buildings, sky and swans. He uses beautiful metaphors for the river and the sky.
‘The river nosed past,
Pliable, oil-skinned, wearing
A transfer of gables and sky
Hunched over the railing’
This is a very effective and lyrical description of the river using words in unusual ways for example, ‘oil-skinned’ and ‘wearing a transfer of gables and sky’ to describe the reflections in the water.
In verse 3 the picture changes ‘something slobbered curtly, close’ the use of alliteration heightens the effect that is continued in the second and third line.
‘smudging the silence; a rat
slimed out of the water’
In the first description of the rat Heaney uses words that suggest the rat is all-powerful and fearsome.
‘Stopped, black bunched and glistening,
ears plastered down on his knobbed skull,
insidiously listening
‘ the tapered tail that followed him,
the raindrop eye, the old snout’
However in the second description at the end of the poem when Heaney has confronted his fear, the words chosen reduce the rat to its right size.
‘This terror, cold, wet-furred, small-clawed,
Retreated up a pipe for sewage’
Heaney is especially effective when he changes the use of words, for example he turns the noun, slime, into a verb, ‘slimed’ and the adjective, nimble also becomes a verb, ‘nimbling’.
In the third poem, ‘Mid-term Break’, Heaney writes very beautifully and movingly about the experience of being called home from boarding school at the age of 14 to attend a family funeral. The poem records the true story of how Heaney’s four-year-old brother, Christopher, was knocked down in the road and killed, and is written from Heaney’s viewpoint, but as if he is the he was when Christopher died.
While he waits to be collected from school he listens to the second of
‘Counting bells, knelling classes to a close’.
The alliteration and the adjective ‘knelling’ is an economic but lyrical description of the sombre sound that sets the tone of the poem. When he arrives back home, he is aware of how the adults around him are trying to cope with the death. His father ‘crying’, used to death,
‘he had always taken funerals in his stride’
the baby, to young to realise what was happening,
‘cooed and laughed and rocked the pram’
the old men who told him,
‘they were sorry for my trouble’
and his mother, grief-stricken by the death of her son,
‘coughed out angry tearless sighs’
In these brief and lyrical descriptions, Heaney paints a picture of the different people collected together in the house to offer their condolences to the bereaved family.
The poem ends with a vivid description of how he took part in the custom of going in to see his brother, who was lying in his coffin in a room in the house, before he was buried.
The last two verses describing this are very moving. Heaney shows the contrast between the pale face of his brother and the vivid red bruise on hi left temple, describing it as ‘poppy’. He shows the quiet and peacefulness of the bedroom using not only the visual images but also the soft ‘s’ sounds.
‘snowdrops and candles soothed the bedside’
The last line is very poignant with two short similar phrases and the repetition of the word ‘foot’.
A four foot box, a foot for every year’
Which reminds us that a four old year who is lying in a four-foot coffin.
In analysing these three poems in detail, I have been able to understand how Seamus Heaney is able to bring ‘lyrical beauty, ethical depth, everyday miracles and the lining past exalted’ to his poetry. Once read or heard, his poetry makes a lasting impression because of these qualities that strikes a chord in the listening or reader.
