‘Like wet gloves’
This phrase is very expressive, ‘wet gloves’ are unwanted objects as you use them to keep warm and if they were wet they would be discarded. Some gloves are fleece, comparing with the fur of the kittens. The five-finger indentations of a glove may resemble the limbs of a kitten.
‘They bobbed and shone till he sluiced’
A simile is used comparing them to wet gloves, and the words 'glossy' and 'bobbed' create a watery, wet effect. Most striking of all is the oxymoron ‘glossy and dead’.
As glossy coat is usually seen as a sign of animal health, but as we no they are very far from health.
The next stanza carries on from where the last one left, and is largely about death and the child's reaction to it.
‘Suddenly frightened, for days I sadly hung’
‘Suddenly’ indicates that the consequences of the actions hit young Heaney all at once, then after it stayed in his mind for ‘days’ after becoming his burden.
‘Round the yard, watching the three sogged remains’
Heaney could do nothing else apart from stand and look at the dead kittens.
The wet effect again comes into play, with the word 'sogged' being used.
'Turn mealy and crisp as old summer dung'
More imagery is used in the form of a simile. The simile helps the reader think of other mealy and crisp items, (most of them won't be very pleasant).
‘Until I forgot them. But the fear came back
When Dan trapped big rats, snared rabbits, shot crows
Or, with a sickening tug, pulled old hens’ necks.
The fifth stanza just describes the other murders of Dan Taggart. Which continues to damage Heaney further, with more innocent victims being slaughtered.
‘Still, living displaces false sentiments
And now, when shrill pups are prodded to drown
I just shrug, ‘bloody pups’. It makes sense:’
I think the only reason that Heaney has began to think like this is because Dan Taggart has poisoned his mind making him respond in this way.
“Prevention of cruelty’ talk cuts ice in town’
It’s as if the people in the town never knew this sort of killing ever happened and now they want to prevent it in someway.
‘Where they consider death unnatural,
But on well-run farms pests have to be kept down.’
This confirms my previous statement. So to have a good farm you have to make that sacrifice. I think poem is about how we lose innocence once under the influence of a threat.
The second poem I studied was ‘Mid-Term Break’. Mid-Term Break is an incredibly sad poem, which is about the death of Heaney's infant brother (Christopher) and how people (including himself) reacted to this. Poem's title suggests a holiday but this "break" is not for pleasant reasons. For most of the poem Heaney writes of people's unnatural reactions, but at the end he is able to grieve honestly.
‘I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close
At two o’clock our neighbors drove me home’
The stanza begins with the ‘morning’ in line one, but it is two o'clock in line three, showing that hours have passed in waiting. The reader asks himself the question ‘why does his neighbors drive him home?’ there could be a number of reasons. The next stanza explains why his parents were not up to retrieving him from school.
‘In the porch I met my father crying
He had always taken funerals in his stride
And Big Jim evens saying it was a hard blow,
The second stanza begins with the image of Heaney's father ‘crying’. Heaney's father appears to be a strong man of few words, so having him crying causes a powerful emotion in the reader. If Heaney is told be big Jim Evens that ‘it was a hard blow’ must mean something big has happened.
Heaney skillfully takes the reader with him as he enters the house through the porch as we meet his father; ‘Big Jim Evans’; the baby in its pram;
the old men (some of which he probably dint know, because he was away at boarding school) gathered in the room; and finally Heaney's mother coughing out ‘angry tearless sighs’, which show that she was hiding her true emotions. I think that by holding Seamus’s hand she mainly gives her self-comfort rather than offering Seamus comfort.
‘At ten o clock the ambulance arrived
with the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.’
This gives a confusing image as an ambulance is thought of taking way people to get better, rather than bring back dead people. The nurses have tried to conceal the wounds of the boy and make him look more presentable to his family. The next stanza takes place the following day, when Heaney goes to see his brother.
‘Next morning I went up into the room.’
The word ‘the’ implies that the guests referred to that specific room as ‘The Room’ the previous night.
‘Snowdrops
and candles soothed the bedside’
The candles and snowdrops were used to try and improve the atmosphere of the room.
We also learn in this stanza that Heaney hadn't seen his brother for six weeks having been "away at school", which cocludes that he went to a boarding school. The words "paler now", hang at the end of the stanza on line 18, causing a sad pause before the sentence continues and describes how little changed in appearance from when the boy was alive and dead, his apperance was exactly how Heaney remembers him, but wearing a ‘poppy rose’ on his forehead, Heaney tries to configure how such a small wound can take a life.
‘He lay in the our foot box as in his cot’
This is Heaney remembering him as a baby, sleeping in his cot, and in any second he will awake and want to play with Seamus, that is what he has to take in to account whilst he stares at his brother.
‘No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear’
Because the bumper hit him with such force the brother was flung so far and did not bare any ‘gaudy scars’. The following line is written with so much passion and emotion, summing up the poem brilliantly.
‘A four foot box, a foot for every year’
As this poem was written in one single sitting, Seamus Heaney was able to channel emotions in to poem, instead of spreading it out. This way the poem gives more penetration to the readers mind.
The third poem I studied is Limbo. The story in this poem makes the reader ask as many questions’ as it answers. Heany writes this poem ehich reaches the readers heart.
‘Fishermen at Ballyshannon
Netted an infant last night’
Once again like in many of Heaneys poems the first stanza introduce the subject (‘Netted an Infant’) and setting (‘Ballyshannon’). The fisherman must have been distraught once they saw the baby in their nets.
‘Along with the salmon’
This explains what the fisherman where fishing for, but it is an unpleasant way of finding a body among a load of fish.
‘An illegitimate spawning’
This shows that the baby was not supposed to be their and one of the most extraordinary things you catch when you go fishing.
‘A small one thrown back to the waters’
‘A small one’ obviously describes the baby, ‘ thrown back to the waters’ can mean two things, either it means like a small fish you throw it back because it is too small or because when it was in its mothers womb it was in her waters.
‘But I am sure
as she stood in the shallows
Ducking him tenderly’
These lines show enjamberment and an oxymoron most of Heaneys poems show these elements repeatedly. The enjamberment is the three lines flowing into each other, and the oxymoron is ‘Ducking him tenderly’, how can you drown somebody tenderly? Could the ‘she’ be his mother? If so what has happened to the mother who makes such an unspeakably horrible choice to drown her newborn son? And what religion can be so stern as to teach that illegitimacy is so unacceptable that a mother would choose to destroy her own child?
‘Till the frozen knobs of her wrists
Were dead as gravel’
‘frozen knobs’ I interoperated as the mothers hands, ‘dead as gravel’ as in the sense that those hands killed somebody so they were dead, or because gravel is life less and doesn’t move. What becomes of the mother who with freezing hands quietly drowns him?
‘He was a minnow with hooks
Tearing her open.’
This confirms that he was a burden to the young mother, ‘a minnow’ again this shows that he was very small, delicate and innocent.
‘She waded in under
The sign of her cross.’
This translates to she walked deeper because of her religion, but what religion can force somebody to do such a thing? She would be made an outcast if she kept it, so she resorted to this.
‘He was hauled in with the fish.’
I think that ‘hauled’ is not the most appropriate word to use, as it give the impression that the baby was thrown, when I think it slowly floated away from the mothers arms.
‘Now limbo will be’
‘Limbo’ being the edge of hell and far from heaven. The following stanza tells the reader that such a devastating action was carried out, that not even Jesus Christ , could not bring that young boys soul to heaven, as that action was done because of the mothers religion.
‘Even Christ’s palms, unhealed,
Smart and cannot fish there,’
Even Christ Himself feels his wounds and cannot draw near the drowning sight as though he never intended such an act to be performed under the sign of His cross.
All the way through the poem references were made to fishing, as fishermen found the baby. E.g. ‘Netted’, ‘small one thrown back’, ‘He was a minnow’. After reading this poem it would be easy to be against the Catholic Church for its stern and dispassionate rejection of unbaptized infants from a permanent place in Heaven, but I think society in general must share the blame for its lack of support. It is too easy to pass judgment upon women particularly who find themselves in untenable positions, giving birth to children outside of a stable and supportive marriage. These are the very souls who most need the help of society. In society’s defense, I would like to think we are becoming more accepting of children “born out of wedlock”, but nonetheless even today most single mothers have a hard life ahead of them.
The last poem I studied on pain and suffering was Bye-Child. Bye-Child tells the story of a feral child found shut up in a henhouse, the ultimate symbol of ignorance, isolation and alienation. He is fed on scraps thrown through a trapdoor ‘morning and evening’. This image is an extreme dramatization of Irish poverty and deprivation. The child lives for the arrival of the scraps, his only link with the unnamed ‘she’ (his mother?) and for the sight of the lamplight in the window, the symbol of comfort and companionship from which he is inexplicably excluded. His uncomprehending patience is compared to that of a dog; he is ‘kennelled and faithful’. Despite the misery and neglect of his parents (‘their’ implies his mother has companionship), there is no resentment in his acceptance of his situation. He loves the light. The poem is written like a newspaper report because I believe that Heaney found the basis for this poem in a newspaper.
‘When the lamp glowed
a yolk of light’
The boy is being kept in a hen house and that is the connection of using ‘yolk of light’. The last two lines of this stanza show the boys neglect and his own desire to find out what is beyond his surroundings.
‘The child in the outhouse
Put his eye to the chink’
The boys is given a nick name and that is his only identification ‘Little henhouse boy’. He is described as ‘sharp-face as new moons’ because he is fed little and his bones stick out, stand out like a full moon in the sky. The next part is the person who feeds the boys thoughts of him.
‘Remembered, your photo still
Glimpsed like a rodent
On the floor of my mind’
The line ‘glimpsed like a rodent’ is very powerful. ‘Glimpsed’ means that he is only look at rarely, ‘like a rodent’ is comparing a human being with a disease-carrying rat, that scurries around in the mind of the boys feeder.
‘Little moon man’
Because he is under nourished he has yellow skin like that of the moon being made out of cheese.
‘Kennelled and faithful’
This is describing his characteristics being that of a dog.
‘At the foot of the yard,’
Your foot is the furthest part of your body from your eyes (sight) so the hen house is as far away so it is hard to see.
‘Your frail shape, luminous,
Weightless, is stirring the dust,
The ‘frail shape’ is his skinny anatomy; ‘luminous’ means that he is so deprived of food, sunlight and exercise that he would stand out in a crowd.
‘Weightless’ again describes his lack of food making him thin.
‘ The cobwebs, old droppongs’
This indicates that he has been there a long time for spiders to get in and it is not cleaned because of the ‘old droppings’ and ‘cobwebs’.
‘dry smells from scraps
She put through your trapdoor
Morning and evening.’
The ‘scraps’ are probably leftovers from breakfast and dinner, the fact that he uses ‘trapdoor’ is evidence of his neglect because what ever you keep behind a trapdoor you want to stay hidden. ‘Morning and evening’ are his meal times.
‘After those footsteps, silence;
Vigils, solitudes, fasts,’
It explains that once ‘she’ has delivered his meal of scraps, all there is, is silence, watching, calmness, starvation. The baby was not even christened like the baby from ‘Limbo’. For some reason he loved the light.
‘A puzzled love of the light
But know you speak at last’
Somebody has found the child and because it was not surrounded by the human voice, so it was unable to speak, since he was rescued he has learnt to speak.
‘With a remote mime
Of something beyond patience,
Your gaping wordless proof
Of lunar distances
Travelled beyond love’
This stanza explains that even though the boy has been treated so poorly with no respect, he still has hope and unlimited patience because of this tragedy.
The poem ‘Digging’, is written about the poet’s recollection of his own process of sitting down to write, and hearing his father digging in the garden. I chose to write about this poem as a contrast to all the others as this is a poem written in a positive view of his childhood and so many are wrote with a negative tone. The sound of the spade sinking into the ‘gravelly ground’ brings back a flood of childhood memories of his father and his grandfather digging on the farm. What Heaney states near the end of the poem in the line:
‘But I’ve no spade to follow men like them’
Illustrates the main underlying theme of the poem, Heaney’s need to follow his own path as a writer.
The way Heaney portrays his father and his Grandfather is as ‘men’ who were born to dig.
‘By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.’
This idea of the digging fitting to his father’s destiny, can be seen in the first two lines at the beginning of the fourth stanza:
‘The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.’
In this, Heaney creates the feeling of the spade fitted his father well, nestling well under his boot and ‘firmly’ against his knee. As a comparison, the first two lines of the poem depict how the pen being the instrument of Heaney’s destiny, fitting, ‘snug as a gun.’ Instead of the spade, this is the instrument with which Heaney will do his work, his ‘digging’.
‘Between my finger and my thumb the squat pen rests. I’ll dig with it.’
The poem is not just about Heaney’s desire to follow his dream of being a writer, but is an illustration of his dream. In his poetic craft and his imagery, of his pen is digging the language that will depict his father and his grandfather in words as, opposed to digging ‘turf’. The form of the poem is nine stanzas that vary in length from two lines to five. Written predominately in no pattern, there are several occasions, however, when Heaney uses rhyme and half-rhymes; most notably at the beginning of the poem the half-rhyme of ‘thumb’ and ‘gun’. Heaney uses full and half-rhyme again in the second stanza to emphasize the spade sinking into the ground. The repetition of the long ‘ou’ sounds in: ‘sound’, ‘ground’, and ‘down’, create a sense of repetition of sound and movement, like the relentless action of digging.
The poem appears to be written in a loose sense (structure), however, Heaney varies the length of lines to aid the meaning of his language. The first two lines are shorter than most at eight syllables each, this helps to strengthen the sense of compactness that Heaney is trying to create:-
‘Between my finger and my thumb 8 syllables
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.’ 8 syllables
Shortening the syllable count of a line is used also to add further strength to it
‘By God, the old man could handle a spade. 10 syllables
Just like his old man.’ 5 syllables
The imagery that Heaney uses throughout the poem depicts the very vivid detail of the digging, and also, the remembrance detail from childhood memories. There is also alliteration of ‘spade sinks’ with the S’s being onomatopoeic of the sound of the metal shovel sliding through the ‘gravelly ground’, his father ‘Nicking and slicing’ and ‘heaving’ of sods as Heaney writes ‘going down and down’, searching for the good turf in the same way that Heaney would be writing and writing in search of the good language and expression.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap’
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.’
The tone of Heaney’s language throughout the poem is conversational, and contains a number of day to day terms and expressions, such as: ‘By God, the old man...’ and ‘...then fell to right away’. The fact that this language has the essence of being the spoken dialect of Heaney, strengthens the idea that this is the metaphorical ‘turf’ of language that comes naturally to him.
