A quote from Seamus Heaney’s poem entitled “Summer 1969” is “He painted with his fists and elbows, flourished / The stained cape of his heart as history charged” which will greatly influence my discussion of his developing expressions of his role as an Irish poet. In this essay I will be discussing his poems entitled “Bog Queen”, “Punishment” and “Summer 1969”. In discussing any poet, one must always consider the social and political background to the poetry since poetry never exists in a vacuum but is always influenced by its social and political times. As a northern poet, Heaney’s work is very much connected to the troubles in the north and his vision is bound up with that of civil disturbance. Heaney benefited from the connection to Britain in such matters as free education and free medical care but as a Catholic and native Irishman, he was also part of the oppressed. Heaney like all northern poets, shows a very clear and differential history of the six counties. Like all other male poets of his time, Heaney stood in the shadow of the internationally acclaimed and hugely influential, W.B. Yeats. Yeats’ use of poetic form and his mastery over the art of poetry was daunting for his successors. Yeats kept to traditional form, meters and rhyme and was a master craftsman. Heaney, similarly to Yeats, has an extraordinary gift for rhymes and a songlike quality to his poetry. Unlike poets like Thomas Kinsella who reject and move away from the style of Yeats, Heaney retains such qualities in the Yeatsian era. Heaney is from a rural background and is remote from the cities and the cosmopolitan and his work is steeped in Catholic rhetoric. While Heaney, the man, is cosmopolitan, his poetry is not and this is a positive thing....
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...sibility for standing “dumb” while this violence occurred. Finally, it is in the poem “Summer 1969” that Heaney fully develops his expression of his role as Irish poet. This poem consists of a more meditative approach and he acknowledges his own thinking. He decides that he must take Goya as his role model and accept responsibility for the atrocities in the north and reflect them in his poetry. While “Summer 1969” may not be considered as compelling as the previous two poems mentioned it is the most responsible, honest and well thought-out poem of the three. It was indeed Goya that inspired this change of heart in Heaney when he saw the painter was not afraid to accept responsibility as an artist and allow himself be stained with the blood of history. “...He painted with his fists and elbows, flourished / The stained cape of his heart as history charged”.
Heaney does not describe his father and grandfather as rough, unclean men that are practicing hard labour. Rather they are described as artists performing a ritual. Heaney's father digs in a "rhythm" (8), which creates a beautiful image of a man that is doing something meaningful for himself. The words "nestled" (10) and "levered firmly" (11) suggest the professionalism of Heaney's father and establishes the idea of him as an artist and not a...
This survey only touches on a handful of paintings, which cover a variety of typecasts, from the wretched to the cruel, and can be seen to be a pictorial catalogue of the difficulty of British views on Ireland. By representing the poor Irish as charming or the middle class as being similar to their British equals, the Irish could give the idea to be unthreatening and symbolically tamed. The artist, in their attempt to deal with the events of the great Famine accepted and indeed hid within the lines of conformity, refusing to tackle the reality of the situations, which more often than not were shabbily dealt with by those in power. As for the Irish artist, they revealed the greatest insight into the complications between the two nations. They thought themselves as different; there assumptions about art and subject matter left a lot to be desired.
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:
Seamus Heaney’s poem “Blackberry-Picking” does not merely describe a child’s summer activity of collecting berries for amusement. Rather, it details a stronger motivation, ruled by a more primal urge, guised as a fanciful experience of childhood and its many lessons. This is shown through Heaney’s use of language in the poem, including vibrant diction, intense imagery and powerful metaphor—an uncommon mix coming from a child’s perspective.
Heaney’s poem, “Digging” showed that while the boy still loved his father, he did not wish to carry on the tradition of potato digging that had been in his family for generations. For example, Heaney wrote that he had “no spade to follow men like them”(Spence par 1). This quote states that Heaney, although loving his father, did not think he could carry on the tradition. Heaney remembers the way he would bring his grandfather a glass of milk, and would drink the entire bottle, and then would watch his grandfather fall to work once again. This brings about the fact that while still caring a great deal for his father and grandfather, he still would prefer the path of a writer (Glover 542). Ultimately, Heaney chose not to “follow men like them”, and chose instead on becoming a writer. This is backed up later in the poem when Heaney writes “Between my finger and my thumb/The squat pen rests/I’ll dig with it.” Heaney had always watched his father from the upstairs window while he dug, and Heaney would watch and write, and this fanned the fire for Heaney’s desire to become a writer (Pellegrio pa...
Sylvia Plath was known as an American Poet, Novelist and Shorty story writer. However, Plath lived a melancholic life. After Plath graduated from Smith College, Plath moved to Cambridge, England on a full scholarship. While Plath was Studying in England, she married Ted Hughes, an English poet. Shortly after, Plath returned to Massachusetts and began her first collection of poems, “Colossus”, which was published first in England and later the United States. Due to depression built up inside, Plath committed suicide leaving her family behind. Sylvia Plath was a gifted and troubled poet, known for the confessional style of her work, which is how “Mirror” came to be. Although this poem may seem like the reader is reading from first person point of view, there is a much deeper meaning behind Plath’s message throughout the poem. Plath uses several elements of terror and darkness to show change to the minds of the readers.
Larkin published his collection of poems ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ in 1964. The main focus of this collection is of post war Britain, but materialism and consumerism are also common themes which are evident in some of Larkin’s poetry. In Larkin’s poems ‘essential beauty’, ‘the large cool stores’ and ‘here’ all take reference to the ideology that there is a material world that the proletariat aspire to be a part of. ‘Mr Bleaney’ then shows the life of the working class, and that they don’t have these material possessions, which lead to little recognition of their lives. Over all they all suggests that because of the material world we have be born into it allows the bourgeoisies to condition the proletariat into accepting the capitalist society through creating a false
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...
Did I Miss Anything? is a poem written by a Canadian poet and academic Tom Wayman. Being a teacher, he creates a piece of literature, where he considers the answers given by a teacher on one and the same question asked by a student, who frequently misses a class. So, there are two speakers present in it – a teacher and a student. The first one is fully presented in the poem and the second one exists only in the title of it. The speakers immediately place the reader in the appropriate setting, where the actions of a poem take place – a regular classroom. Moreover, the speakers unfolds the main theme of the poem – a hardship of being a teacher, the importance of education and laziness, indifference and careless attitudes of a student towards studying.
Helen of Troy, known as the most beautiful woman of ancient Greek culture, is the catalyst for the Trojan War. As such, she is the subject of both Edgar Allen Poe’s “To Helen” and H.D.’s “Helen”; however, their perceptions of Helen are opposites. Many poets and authors have written about Helen in regards to her beauty and her treacherous actions. There is a tremendous contrast between the views of Helen in both poems by Poe and Doolittle. The reader may ascertain the contrast in the speakers’ views of Helen through their incorporation of diction, imagery, and tone that help convey the meaning of the work.
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,
The poem September 1913 focuses on the time where the Irish Independence was at its highest. Yeats repeats the phrase “romantic Ireland” a lot in this poem as it refers to the sacrifice of the materialistic things for independence and freedom. To further emphasize the importance and greatness of the revolution, Yeats pointed out the names of heroic individuals who gave their lives to fight for the cause. Yeats did not give any detail about the Irish heroes but he does state that “they have gone about the world like wind” (11). The heroes were so famous; their names could be heard and talked about all over the world. In this poem, Yeats does not go directly in to detail about the historical events that happened but fo...
James Joyce began his writing career in 1914 with a series of realistic stories published in a collection called The Dubliners. These short literary pieces are a glimpse into the ‘paralysis’ that those who lived in the turn of the century Ireland and its capital experienced at various points in life (Greenblatt, 2277). Two of the selections, “Araby” and “The Dead” are examples of Joyce’s ability to tell a story with precise details while remaining a detached third person narrator. “Araby” is centered on the main character experiencing an epiphany while “The Dead” is Joyce’s experiment with trying to remain objective. One might assume Joyce had trouble with objectivity when it concerned the setting of Ireland because Dublin would prove to be his only topic. According the editors of the Norton Anthology of Literature, “No writer has ever been more soaked in Dublin, its atmosphere, its history, its topography. He devised ways of expanding his account of the Irish capital, however, so that they became microcosms of human history, geography, and experience.” (Greenblatt, 2277) In both “Araby” and “The Dead” the climax reveals an epiphany of sorts that the main characters experience and each realize his actual position in life and its ultimate permanency.
This refrain enforces his disgust at the type of money hungry people that the Irish have become. In the third and fourth stanza, however, Yeats completely changes the tone of his poetry. He praises the romantics of Irish history, such as Rob...