Act of Union essay

Authors Avatar

Act of Union

I

To-night, a first movement, a pulse,
As if the rain in bogland gathered head
To slip and flood: a bog-burst,
A gash breaking open the ferny bed.
Your back is a firm line of eastern coast
And arms and legs are thrown
Beyond your gradual hills. I caress
The heaving province where our past has grown.
I am the tall kingdom over your shoulder
That you would neither cajole nor ignore.
Conquest is a lie. I grow older
Conceding your half-independant shore
Within whose borders now my legacy
Culminates inexorably.

II

And I am still imperially
Male, leaving you with pain,
The rending process in the colony,
The battering ram, the boom burst from within.
The act sprouted an obsinate fifth column
Whose stance is growing unilateral.
His heart beneath your heart is a wardrum
Mustering force. His parasitical
And ignmorant little fists already
Beat at your borders and I know they're cocked
At me across the water. No treaty
I foresee will salve completely your tracked
And stretchmarked body, the big pain
That leaves you raw, like opened ground, again

Act of Union by Seamus Heaney is a metaphorical interpretation of the situation between and Britain and Ireland over the past centuries. It is written in the form of two sonnets in separate parts, as you will have seen.

Join now!

At first the poem seemed really difficult and confused everyone into thinking it was about various other things that at the end seemed quite funny. The ideas some people came up with in class seemed reasonable at first but at the end they seemed almost funny when we found out what the poem really meant.

The poem seemed very complex and was by far the most confusing poem I have ever read. It was a bit like a jigsaw puzzle, once more parts fitted together it became more and more clear. At first you don’t think it’s got ...

This is a preview of the whole essay