Seamus Heaney

 

Act of Union

 

I
To-night, a first movement, a pulse,
As if the rain in bogland gathered head
To slip and flood: a bog-burst,
A gash breaking open the ferny bed.
Your back is a firm line of eastern coast
And arms and legs are thrown
Beyond your gradual hills. I caress
The heaving province where our past has grown.
I am the tall kingdom over your shoulder
That you would neither cajole nor ignore.
Conquest is a lie. I grow older
Conceding your half-independant shore
Within whose borders now my legacy
Culminates inexorably.

II
And I am still imperially
Male, leaving you with pain,
The rending process in the colony,
The battering ram, the boom burst from within.
The act sprouted an obsinate fifth column
Whose stance is growing unilateral.
His heart beneath your heart is a wardrum
Mustering force. His parasitical
And ignmorant little fists already
Beat at your borders and I know they're cocked
At me across the water. No treaty
I foresee will salve completely your tracked
And stretchmarked body, the big pain
That leaves you raw, like opened ground, again

 

Source:

http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poet=6714&poem=31188

 

 

 

 

In this paper I am going to analyze a poem written by Seamus Heaney. This poem is “Act of Union”. And only reading the title we can think that this poet, this person is writing this because he wants a union, an act of union. It is important to say that this poet was from Ireland. He was a Nationalist, radical and pro-independence, so we can say that his poetry is going to be a king of protests, written in English because this is the majority language in Great Britain, and if he wants his poetry to be known all over the world, he should write in English. (Vicente Forés, April 11th, 2006)

         This poem has been divided into two parts I and II, and both of them have fourteen verses. The first part of the poem, I, where the poet is talking in past, we realize that he is not talking to another person, but to his country, to Ireland, the place where he was born, his native country. With this poem, Seamus Haney is telling the English people that he is not from England, he does not talk the English language, but he feels obliged to show what he is living, the search of independence for Ireland and for the Irish people. In this part, the poet is saying that his country has been half-independent, so, it has never been totally-independent and it needed another country to survive. (Verse 12)

         In this first part we find some words that we do not understand(after looking at a dictionary),  words as “bogland”, “bog-burst” or “cajole” and we do not know if these words are from Irish vocabulary or simply the poet does not speak very well the English language.

         The poem has been written as a claim, he is telling his experience, his life, how he has lived and how he is living now the problem of independence. And he writes in bad English, words that we do not understand, and are not in an English dictionary, so this makes the reading of the poem difficult and not very easy to understand.

         The second part of the poem, II, where the poet is talking in present, he describes his current present, what he is living now, his present experiences, what he is doing now. He describes he is leaving his country, but he still loves it.

         Here we find a word that we do not know very well what it means, even if we look at a dictionary (I did not find this word), this word is “wardrum”, in verse 21. So, this is another sign that the poet is not an English speaker, and that he has a lot of mistakes in this language.

         In this second part the poet is describing his land as a territory that will never be healed, because it has a lot of wounds. We can see this metaphor at the end of the poem:

“At me across the water. No treaty

I foresee will salve completely your tracked

And stretchmarked body, the big pain

That leaves you raw, like opened ground, again.”

 

         This poem is not easy to read because of the vocabulary, but not because the poet did it difficult, because for him, the English language was difficult, as this was not his mother tongue. So, he mixed English and Irish vocabulary, which we do not understand.

         Another reason of the difficulty of this poem is that if you do not know what the poet is referring to, it is complicated to ascertain that the poet is talking about his land, his native country, which he loves, and he suffers watching that it is not possible what he and other Irish people would like to happen: the total independence of the country.

         This poem is an example of what we could say love to the own country.

 

 

 

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Bibliography:

  • WIKIPEDIA. THE FREE ENCYCLOPEDIA.

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seamus_Heaney

2. May.2006

  • POEMHUNTER.com

Poem by Seamus Heaney: Act of Union

http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poet=6714&poem=31188

2.May.2006

  • English Poetry in the 19th and 20th centuries class

Teacher: Vicente Forés

11.April.2006