The Strand at Lough Beg
The Part of this poem that is to be looked at first is imagery in the title of the poem. Seamus Heaney starts us off by giving us this picture of the Strand at Lough Beg, which is the shore of a lake. Already the reader is given the starting point of this story; the Kind of person that Colum McCartney is.
Seamus Heamey begins the poem with an image of isolation, confusion, and the loss of safety. Heaney describes what happen the night that his cousin was killed:
Leaving the white glow of the filling stations
And a few lonely street lamps among the fields
You climbed the hills towards Newtownhamilton
Past the Fews Forest. Out beneath the stars- (lines 1-4)
The first few lines describe how his cousin started out in the glow of the gas station where he was, and him driving off to an open area in a town with the stars above him. The light here represented safety. Colum has started off in a situation where he was very close to this light: where there was, most likely, a store and other people. After he is done at the gas station he then drives away. Heaney gives us the image of the lampposts passing by as he drove. This shows how the light was now outside of where he was but it was still with him. Finally he drives up to Netownhamilton, passing some forests on the way and place where the only light that he is exposed to is the stars that are shining down at him from the sky. This now represents how the imminent safety that he had at the public gas station was now gone and he was isolated, in these hills only lit by stars. The safety in the light is now, far way: leaving him exposed to anything "outside". The image of the first few lines is of Colum now isolated, surrounded...
... middle of paper ...
...uried. The way Heaney describes this cleansing of the body and clothing it was depicted in a very ritualistic and loving way. It showed how important it was to Heaney that his cousin was buried correctly and humanely.
Seamus Heaney's The Strand at Lough Beg describes Colum McCartney's death in three different ways: The way he might have died, why he shouldn't have died, and the way he should have been put to rest. It is important to notice how Heany doesn't mention, once, any vindictive hatred towards the killers but instead focuses on love and an undying respect for the dead. The poem starts out with a tempestuous seen, that connects to all the readers senses and introduces us to the scene of his death. However, the poem develops into a loving and heartbreaking eulogy to Colum McCartney, through Heaney's expression of light, mystery, change, and way of living.
The timeline carries on chronologically, the intense imagery exaggerated to allow the poem to mimic childlike mannerisms. This, subjectively, lets the reader experience the adventure through the young speaker’s eyes. The personification of “sunset”, (5) “shutters”, (8) “shadows”, (19) and “lamplights” (10) makes the world appear alive and allows nothing to be a passing detail, very akin to a child’s imagination. The sunset, alive as it may seem, ordinarily depicts a euphemism for death, similar to the image of the “shutters closing like the eyelids”
I think the main idea the narrators is trying to emphasize is the theme of opposition between the chaotic world and the human need for community with a series of opposing images, especially darkness and light. The narrator repeatedly associates light with the desire to clear or give form to the needs and passions, which arise out of inner darkness. He also opposes light as an idea of order to darkness in the world, the chaos that adults endure, but of which they normally cannot speak to children.
The Poet begins with the Rocky Mountain Newspaper reporter Jack McEvoy being informed of his twin brother’s suicide. As two of the detectives from the Denver police department who also worked with Sean McEvoy in the Crimes Against Persons unit inform McEvoy of the incident, he immediately has doubts about his twin’s alleged suicide. Seeking to better understand what his brother did and what the Denver PD says his brother did, Jack McEvoy decides to write a story for the paper about his brother. From this point on McEvoy began to learn about evil in a new way.
There are many factors that will shape a young boy’s life, but possibly none more important than the role of that boy’s father. Seamus Heaney and Theodore Roethke both have shown the importance of the father role in their poems “Digging” and “My Papas Waltz.” Although the roles of the fathers in these poems were different, the respect and admiration shown by their sons is one in the same. Weather it is Heaney’s father digging under his window, or Roehtke’s father dancing him around as a little boy, the love shown in these two poems, shows a direct relation on the lives they shared with their fathers.
In the first stanza, it is established that the poem is written in the first person, when “I” is referring to the speaker, which illustrates this person’s point of view concerning the tragedy of 9/11 during a whole day of events. The speaker begins by setting a tranquil mood as the opening of a long list of last names. In line 1, he says: “Yesterday, I lay awake in the palm of the night.” He describes the night like a tropical tree gently swaying in a peaceful beach setting. He calmly observes the gentle raindrops dripping slowly down his windows until they disappear in “A soft rain stole in, unhelped by any breeze, / And when I saw the silver glaze on the windows,” (2-3). For a brief moment, he enjoys going outside to his garden at sunrise to forget the sorrow that death brings when “In the morning, I walked out barefoot / Among thousands of flowers” (11-12).
“I wanted to grow up and plough, /To close one eye, stiffen my arm.” (“Follower” 17-18). Seamus Heaney is writing about a son; interested in following his father’s footsteps to become a farmer. The poem depicts the son’s past memories of his father. Fascinated in his father’s work, influenced by his mastery at farming, the son strives to become the same at a young age. “The Writer” on the other hand, portrays a father’s observation of his daughter, struggling to write a story as an author. Both pieces, share a common interaction between parent and child, but the parent-child relationships themselves are fundamentally different. These poems represent a reflection of how the parents respectively tackle the task of raising their child.
Boland relates well with Heaney in terms of a tradition that in her case is more literary than oral. In her teen years after reading the poem “The Fool” by Padraic Pearse she unearths deeply seeded emotions of Irish patriotism:
I will discuss the similarities by which these poems explore themes of death and violence through the language, structure and imagery used. In some of the poems I will explore the characters’ motivation for targeting their anger and need to kill towards individuals they know personally whereas others take out their frustration on innocent strangers. On the other hand, the remaining poems I will consider view death in a completely different way by exploring the raw emotions that come with losing a loved one.
...ttachment or emotion. Again, Heaney repeats the use of a discourse marker, to highlight how vividly he remembers the terrible time “Next morning, I went up into the room”. In contrast to the rest of the poem, Heaney finally writes more personally, beginning with the personal pronoun “I”. He describes his memory with an atmosphere that is soft and peaceful “Snowdrops and Candles soothed the bedside” as opposed to the harsh and angry adjectives previously used such as “stanched” and “crying”. With this, Heaney is becoming more and more intimate with his time alone with his brother’s body, and can finally get peace of mind about the death, but still finding the inevitable sadness one feels with the loss of a loved one “A four foot box, a foot for every year”, indirectly telling the reader how young his brother was, and describing that how unfortunate the death was.
In Heaney's book of poetry entitled Opened Ground, Heaney shows the readers many different ways in which English rule and influence effected and changed the lives of different people in Ireland. For example, in Two Lorries, Heaney describes a man who is a coal deliverer and his love for Heaney's mother. As the poem progresses, we can see a metamorphosis in the lorry. As the political situation in Ireland escalates and war between different religious factions grows more immanent, the lorry changes from a man who falls in love with Heaney's mother to a raving political and religious war type man who needs to become involved in the skirmish between the religious groups and by doing this eventually blows...
Although this section is the easiest to read, it sets up the action and requires the most "reading between the lines" to follow along with the quick and meaningful happenings. Millay begins her poem by describing, in first person, the limitations of her world as a child. She links herself to these nature images and wonders about what the world is like beyond the islands and mountains. The initial language and writing style hint at a child-like theme used in this section. This device invites the reader to sit back and enjoy the poem without the pressure to understand complex words and structure.
The first setting introduced in the story is a subway. The subway is where the narrator gets the news that Sonny has been arrested. The gloomy atmosphere of the subway adds to the narrator’s sense of dread. The third line of paragraph one reads, “I stared at it in the swinging lights of the subway car, and in the faces and bodies of the people, and in my own face, trapped in the darkness which roared outside.” The theme of darkness is also mentioned and reoccurs throughout the text.
Now the reader will be ready to tackle the poem again in order to notice and drink in its subtle nuances. Bishop's artistry will lie plain, particularly her capacity to impart life to a rather unnerving redundancy of objects and to project a lofty poetic vision from a humble, prosaic incident.
Heaney, Seamus. "Opened Ground, Selected Poems 1966-1996." Follower. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998. 10.
In the “Digging,” Heaney starts the poem with a self-image, pen in hand. He hears some kind of sound through his window in which case, we come to understand it is his father that is digging. Nonetheless, in line 7, we come to understand that the sound is possibly an echo from the past. In essence, this makes us look into the poem as taking the speaker through not just his father’s memory but also a journey through time in search of self. Further,