HEANEY




 
  
  
   
    
    
    
    
    
   
  
   
 


From clearances 3

   When all the others were away at Mass

    I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.

    They broke the silence, let fall one by one

    Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:

    Cold comforts set between us, things to share

    Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.

    And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes

    From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.

    So while the parish priest at her bedside

    Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying

    And some were responding and some crying

    I remembered her head bent towards my head,

    Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives—

Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/heaney/from_clearances_3.txt

My work is about Heaney’s poem “From clearances 3”. As we can see in the title, the poet talks about somebody who is going to another part, who is made to go. The title suggests that the person is apreciated by the author, and another reason to think this is that nobody writes a poem to a person who doesn’t matter.

In the poem, we are reading about a funeral. It’s divided into two stanzas. In the first stanza, we read about the funeral. People broke the silence, all people are falling one by one to the silence, to think about the dead person. It was cold that day, there were a lot of people and they are in groups. People recall a few good moments (pleasant splashes) and remember the person.

In the second stanza, the author tells that, while the priest is praying with some people, and the others are crying, he remembers how the dead person looked at him, he felt her breath... “never closer the whole rest of our lives”.

The person who is dead, is Heaney’s mother. This poem belongs to a collection of eight sonnets. Here Heaney reflects the emotions of his mother’s death. (www.coursework.info)

The rhyme of the poem, in my opinion, is abab,cdcd, efef, gg, and it’s a sonnet with eight verses in the first stanza and six in the second.

The tone of the poem is melancholic, because he misses his mother. He can’t hug her any more. He is sad, he is remembering his mother, the day of the funeral, the last moment with her...

The author is Irish, catholic and nationalist. He was affected by the violence between catholics and protestants (www.wikipedia.org). Maybe the topic of death in the war inspired the poem with his mother’s death. It could be an influence but, in my opinion the main reason was his mother.

When violence supposed a serious problem, he went to Dublin, in 1972. Since 1984 to 1989, he target at in Harvard University, in Massachusetts. (www.wikipedia.org) The different origin or different English wasn’t a problem to be a foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was professor in Oxford, England, from 1989 to 1994. (www.universalteacher.org.uk) He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995.

In conclusion, I think that the different origin of Heaney wasn’t a problem to go on and to succeed. He avoids the problems and difficulties with the language and with the political situation.

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