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 any big metaphors in it. This is why most people didn’t think it was about countries but most thought it was about some aspect of human relationship. Ideas like betrayal, divorce, giving birth and pregnancy kept popping up. One person even came up with what seemed an “abstract” idea. The idea was that the poem was about a woman pretending to be a man in the army. Everyone seemed to laugh at the idea but in a way she had unlocked a bit of the poem. There was a man and a women in it.
This hard to grasp poem is actually one big metaphor and is actually about the infamous relationship between Britain and the Republic of Ireland. There are many aspects to the poem. There is the geographical, human and political side of it. Our class went through the poem and highlighted in three different colours words from each of the three chosen aspects. This made it slightly easier to see beneath the poem’s camouflage. After doing this it started to become more clear and people started to come up with some more relevant ideas. We slowly began to realise that the poem wasn’t about what we had first thought but in fact about something completely different.
To help us even more Mr Gardner, our teacher, drew us a drawing on the board. In the drawing there was a man and a women. This drawing put together all the imagery from the poem. It worked very well. For example, in the poem it says about an Eastern Coast. This turned out to be the man’s back and “the man” was Britain. The woman he was standing over was Ireland. So the women was Ireland and the man was Britain, ok, but there is a third character. This third character is not so prominent as the other two and a lot harder to see in the poem. This third character is probably meant to be the IRA or UVF. Things all started to click together and the poem was not so difficult after all, it just required a bit of thinking to get the real meaning.
You have to go through the poem bit by bit and “decode” each section. You could see geographical aspects at first but I didn’t think much of it. For example it says in the 9th line, “I am the tall kingdom over your shoulder”. Of course this is talking about Britain standing over Ireland but at first this didn’t occur to anybody but at the end seemed pretty obvious.
There are many things that you can identify that are related in a way to Britain and Ireland. There are words that you would associate with countries such as - Colony, Borders and Kingdom. There are also other geographical points that you would associate with a country, like hills and water.
Anyway, as well as the two main characters there is also a third character mentioned. I personally think that this is one of the Irish terrorist groups such as UVF or IRA. This is portrayed as the baby in Ireland’s stomach, or the baby in the woman’s womb.
So this poem is about a man, Britain, a women, Ireland, and a baby, possibly an Irish terrorist organization?.
It possibly took our class longer to work out because our teacher didn’t give us the name of the man who wrote this poem. This is because he has an Irish name, Seamus Heaney, and this might have given it away slightly. By not giving the name it made it a bit harder because it could have been about any country. This made it much harder for us to work out what the poem really meant. When he “revealed” the name you could hear the “ahh’s” around the room.
This once complicated poem seemed to become more clear and easier as time went on and more and more things got uncovered about it. So at the end Mr Gardner asked who liked the poem. Most of the class did, in fact, all the class except from one or two.
In my opinion at the time I thought it was OK, but thinking about it now I really think it is very clever. It is a clever poem basically describing all Britain and Ireland’s troubles in one short poem. It is very clever how it describes all these things but disguises it in a poem that you think is about human relationship. So overall it was a definite hit!
Ruairidh McPherson.