"The Past is another country and they do things differently there" an essay on Seamus Heaney and his work.

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“The Past is another country and they do things differently there” an essay on Seamus Heaney and his work.

Heaney was born on April 13 1939.  He was the eldest of nine children.  In modern day society it is common to have 2 or 3 children, and to have eight or nine children is considered very unusual.  Heaney lived on the family farm, Mossbawn, about thirty miles northwest of Belfast, in County Derry.  The majority of UK residents live in urban areas, and a small minority live in rural areas.  It used to be more popular in the past to live in a rural area.  People in rural areas live, and have lived, in a totally different culture to that of the people in urban, industrialized areas.  Heaney is Irish, which is also another culture to that of the English, today.  The conflict in Northern Ireland is almost always a backdrop to his work, stated or implicit.

Heaney’s Poems are based on real life experiences, which can be related to in only so many ways, because of the differences in lifestyle, culture etc.  For example in ‘Blackberry Picking’, he is talking of picking berries as a boy, and then hoarding them until they rot.  This may imply that he went berry picking just for the fun of it, but today it is unusual for children to go berry picking, let alone without an adult.  The adult would have known to store the berries properly, but in Heaney’s day berry picking was a ritual for children only.

To my knowledge, the majority of Heaney’s poems were written/ published between 1960 and 1990, though many of the poems refer to his childhood in the 1940’s.  Therefore, even though he is writing from a child’s perspective, he has the understanding of an adult.  He is also able to recall events in more detail.  Many of the poems I have read are about his parents or major events in his childhood, e.g. ‘Follower’ and ‘Mid-term Break’.

The first poem I shall analyse is ‘The Early Purges’.  This poem is about Heaney’s first experience of death, and his subsequent views on death.

In the very first line, Heaney tells us that he was very young when he first encountered death  ‘…  I was six… first saw kittens drown…’ At this quite young age at his first encounter with death I think that Young Heaney would have been scared and saddened.  Saddened because the kittens are not there any more to play with: scared because he thought that Dan Taggert might come and drown him if he became a pest.

In the second line, Heaney shows Dan Taggert’s nonchalance towards the death of the kittens ‘pests’.  I think this our first insight to the views of farmers on death.  Taggert rather than placing the kittens down gently into the bucket, as a townsperson/ someone fond of animals may do, he slung them in ‘pitched them’.  He also called them ‘scraggy wee shits’ which I think reflects the title ‘Purges’.  Taggert is getting rid of something unwanted, something which is a pest nagging at your side, rather than a pet which is loved and cared for.

In the third line of the first stanza and the first line of the second stanza, Heaney creates an image, gives an atmosphere that you can almost see and hear.  ‘…A frail metal sound…’ is a phrase, which is not quite onomatopoeic, but gives a similar concept.  Very good imagery in a hearing sense is used, to grab the reader’s attention.  To connect the first two stanzas, Heaney uses enjambment.  Heaney wants to separate the two stanzas, but at the same time keep them together as he is still talking of the same process, but of different stages.

The caesura in the first line in the second stanza helps to balance out the small, faint rhythm of the poem, and also to end the enjambment.  Heaney uses an oxymoron in the second part of that first line.  The sharp contrast explains to us that even though to us it may be a tiny noise, to the kittens it is the biggest din they can make, hence ‘… tiny din…’

‘… Their tiny din was soon soused…’ This phrase interprets as the kittens ‘din’ was silenced quickly.  Taggert pumped the water into the bucket so as to drown the kittens.  When something is killed, so as to terminate its being a pest or a threat, it is said to be silenced, soused has the same basic concept.

In the first line of the third stanza, Dan Taggert asks if it’s not better for the kittens now.  He asks this because he knows that they will be more use, adding to the dunghill.  He knows that being on the dunghill is more useful for the kittens than they had been pestering the farmer, or the farm hands.

Heaney uses a simile to describe the kittens as ‘…wet gloves…’ Wet gloves are useless.  The objective of gloves if keep your hands warm, but if they are wet then they make your hands cold, making them useless.  In the same way, kittens are only useful if they are out of the way, either being sold for a small sum of money or being killed and added to the dunghill.  Gloves sometimes have a similar look to fur; this can be seen as another similarity between the kitten and the gloves.

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Again Heaney emphasises Taggert’s nonchalance, at the end of the second line, third stanza ‘… He sluiced them out…’ When Taggert slung out the kitten’s he showed no sentimentality.  To him it was just another part of his job ‘another day another dollar’ attitude.

‘Dunghill’ reflects the title ‘purges’.  There are quite a few references in which the title becomes apparent.  Heaney uses it to make quite clear he is talking of bad things: things that need to be ridden of and death.

Between the fourth and fifth stanzas, the enjambment is especially significant because it expresses ...

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