Compare and contrast two of Seamus Heaney's sonnets, 'The Forge' and 'Strange Fruit'.

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Vivian Yuen 12JN

September 18, 2003

English A1 SL

Compare and contrast two of Seamus Heaney’s sonnets, ‘The Forge’ and ‘Strange Fruit’.

The Forge is a descriptive poem in which Heaney celebrates local craftsmanship, explores cultural roots, and discusses social history. The forge described in the poem in one that the poet passed every day on his way to school. Using the smith, an ordinary person, as a metaphor of himself, Heaney celebrates artists in the community, as well as the creation, beauty and perfection in art. The central idea, however, appears to be the mystery and sacredness of this creative process. The work of the forge is presented as an extended metaphor for the construction of a work of art in general (in Heaney’s case the crafting of poetry). The reader, as an on-looker, is ‘outside’ peering in at the ‘unpredictable’ and inexplicable mystery. One may catch glimpses of the beauty in the making, ‘the fantail of sparks’, or hear snatches of its elegant sound, ‘the short pitched ring’ or the ‘hiss’, but the creation of art remains a mystery, beyond the reach of the non-artist.

Strange Fruit is one in a trilogy of poems known as the ‘bog poems’ by Heaney. This set of poems predominantly reflects upon the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, where killings were ritualistic and offerings from the villages to ensure a good harvest the following year. This particular bog poem is filled with images of death and dying. Inter-textuality is seen where the title ‘Strange Fruit’ refers to a song sung by Billie Holiday about the execution of black men in America. The bodies hanging from the trees are ‘strange fruit’--a form of ritualistic execution. On-lookers commiserate and sympathize for the ‘exhumed’ female body, but are also taken aback by the power and resistance of the ‘beheaded’ at the moment of death and in the face of (the poet’s) scrutiny. Her ‘blank’ eyes express something that the poet has to treat with distance, an ‘outstaring’ expression demanding ‘reverence’ and ‘beatification’.

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The Forge is a Petrarchan sonnet of fourteen lines in two parts. The octet (first eight lines) chiefly gives a picture of the actions and sounds inside the forge, whereas the sestet (the following six lines) shifts the focus onto the smith himself. This division allows the anvil as an altar to be emphasized at the crucial part of the poem, thus emphasizing the sacredness of the creation of art. Strictly speaking, this poem is not effective as a sonnet due to a defective rhyming pattern. The pentameter rhyme is uneven and the rhyming scheme is irregular—abba, cddc, efgfeg. Some ...

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