Seamus Heaney’s poem “Postscript” comes from a book of poems The Spirit Level that Heaney published in 1996. In these poems, Heaney tries to entice the reader to be open to marvelous moments of vision in small, everyday moments. Throughout the “Postscript” the speaker is describing an experience with a natural landscape in order to illustrate how experiences can evoke feelings that overwhelm us and leave us speechless because of their transcendent beauty. Finding words for the beautiful, sublime, and uplifting moments can be difficult when encountering such places, and even though the speaker leaves space for the ineffable, the poem makes the reader feel as though they have received a glimpse of something true, a valuable piece of advice about how to move through the world.
The “Postscript” is a lyric in a single, informal verse paragraph that resembles a sonnet, though not keeping to all of the rules of the traditional poetic form. The poem joins a detailed account of an experience in which the speaker took a “drive out west / Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore” (1-2), with a reflection of what the speaker experienced, and advice on how the reader can create their own version of something similar. The structure of the poem coincides with the experience the speaker is describing, and even though the poem loosely follows a common sonnet structure, Heaney incorporates an irregular and arrhythmic pattern to the structure which conveys the spontaneity surrounding the fleeting moment that the speaker is experiencing. The conversational style of the poem, along with the structure, illustrates the extemporaneous nature of experience and thought, and through the use of enjambment, Heaney quickens the pace of the poem in order to ...
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...along the West Coast of Ireland. Heaney is suggesting that it is not the place that is important, but the readiness to sense the combination of events that provide a thrill for the heart.
Thus, Heaney is suggesting that in order for memorable and magical experiences to occur, people have to be willing and alert. It is not a case of searching for a unique experience, but being open to them. The speaker articulates that it is a combination of events while in motion that may surprise and thrill a person, which in turn will lead to their own version of his unique experience. Heaney is urging the reader to avail his or her own opportunities to experience a vision like the one described in the poem, as having the experience is more important than the memory. Bibliography
Works Cited
Heaney, Seamus. “Postscript”. The Spirit Level. London: Faber and Faber, 1996. Print.
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.
The speaker begins the poem an ethereal tone masking the violent nature of her subject matter. The poem is set in the Elysian Fields, a paradise where the souls of the heroic and virtuous were sent (cite). Through her use of the words “dreamed”, “sweet women”, “blossoms” and
Strand, Mark and Evan Boland. The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms. New
It is divided into five parts ‘The Encounter’, ‘Philemon’, ‘The Shore’, ‘The Woods’, and ‘The Lost Children’, These profoundly crafted rhythmic lines will endure and resonate forever in the souls who read it. Rarely does a reader encounter such sheer beauty of timeless and compelling imagery in her debut book to stand apart as foremost publication in English literature.
...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.
My first and immediate explanation for the poem was an address from one lover to a loved one, where distance became a factor in their relationship. The lover has it far worse than the desired partner and the solitude builds nothing but longing for this person at a time when his love is the greatest. He says " What have I to say to you when we shall meet?... I am alone" with my head knocked against the sky”. He further asks, “How can I tell if I shall ever love you again as I do now?” There is uncertainty because he is wondering over the next encounter with his loved one. He says, “I lie here thinking of you” and is compelling when he wants the loved one to see him in the 5th stanza and what love is doing to his state of mind. He is hopeless and expresses it by asking questions he is unsure of, conveying his troubled state. Williams enforces imagery along with sound effects to demonstrate the despair of the man in a realm that is almost dreamlike with purple skies,spoiled colors, and birds. Stating he is alone and that his head collides with the sky may underline the man’s confusion. He also uses imagery in the “stain of love as it eats into the leaves”, and saffron horned branches, vivid and easy-to-imagine images that captivate the reader. The line stating “a smooth purple sky” and this stain which is “spoiling the colours of the whole world” easily formulate a very distinct picture. Through consonance words like “eats” and “smears with saffron” become fiercer in the eyes of this lover as they cancel out a “smooth sky”.
..., the content and form has self-deconstructed, resulting in a meaningless reduction/manifestation of repetition. The primary focus of the poem on the death and memory of a man has been sacrificed, leaving only the skeletal membrane of any sort of focus in the poem. The “Dirge” which initially was meant to reflect on the life of the individual has been completely abstracted. The “Dirge” the reader is left with at the end of the poem is one meant for anyone and no one. Just as the internal contradictions in Kenneth Fearing’s poem have eliminated the substantial significance of each isolated concern, the reader is left without not only a resolution, but any particular tangible meaning at all. The form and content of this poem have quite effectively established a powerful modernist statement, ironically contingent on the absence and not the presence of meaning in life.
One of Emily Dickinson’s greatest skills is taking the familiar and making it unfamiliar. In this sense, she reshapes how her readers view her subjects and the meaning that they have in the world. She also has the ability to assign a word to abstractness, making her poems seemingly vague and unclear on the surface. Her poems are so carefully crafted that each word can be dissected and the reader is able to uncover intense meanings and images. Often focusing on more gothic themes, Dickinson shows an appreciation for the natural world in a handful of poems. Although Dickinson’s poem #1489 seems disoriented, it produces a parallelism of experience between the speaker and the audience that encompasses the abstractness and unexpectedness of an event.
The image of the flax rotting is an image of the cycle of nature. We
..., D. E. (2009, November 7). The Sonnet, Subjectivity, and Gender. Retrieved October 11, 2011, from mit.edu: www.mit.edu/~shaslang/WGS/HendersonSSG.pdf
A very old woman that was almost close to her death. She barely makes it to the lake every day to collect water with her old gray dog by her side. Also a old cracked buckle that she puts the nasty lake water in. The next day she repeats it. That was my summary interruption of Heaney poem in my opinion.
A. “Written in a tempestuous night, on the coast of Sussex.” Elegiac Sonnets. Ed. Stuart Curran. New York: Oxford, 1993.
Moran, Daniel. “Sonnet XXIX.” Poetry for Students. Ed. David Galens. Vol. 16. Detroit: Gale, 2002. 146-147. Print.
The beauty of nature acts like a barrier in human’s ways. It attracts the man towards itself and delays his personal goals. In this poem, the man is attracted to a snowy evening, which forces him to stop and admires the magnificent insight of woods. Imagine trees cover with the white snow, the silence in woods, whistles of wind, and falling snow flakes touches the earth. As he stops in woods, he thinks about the owner of woods. He thinks of the land owner who is not present to see him trespassing. He feels safe as the owner “will not see” him “stopping” in woods “to watch his woods fill up the snow” (lines 3-4). It explains his careless behavior and desire to admire the natural beauty. According to Thomas March, it is not an important fact the man knows the owner, but he is far away from woods. His description of the scene deals with the privacy at that time (March 1). The man loves to stay in woods in spite of a fact that his destination is somewhere else.