Western literature has long been dominated by an imposing patriarchal vision, privileging the voices of men in creating written records of their experiences, commonly centered around conventional heterosexual desire and affluent “artist”...

Irish nationalist Seamus Heaney’s 1975 poem “Act of Union,” written three years after the massacre known as Bloody Sunday, explores the political unification of the colonizer, England, and the colonized, Ireland in which Ireland and England...

In Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Felix Randal,” the speaker has different concerns and different ways of healing from the loss of someone than Seamus Heaney’s “Seeing the Sick.” Though both poems cover the same morbid concept, Hopkins’s poem focuses...

Heaney's autobiographical poem 'Mid Term Break' details how a younger Heaney reacted to the death of his four-year-old brother, as well as how he dealt with suddenly being seen as an adult by his peers. Heaney takes on a numb, almost clinical tone...

The piece “My First Son”, was written by Ben Johnson and the poem “Mid-Term Break” was written by Seamus Heaney. Both poems revolve around the death of a loved one. The directed audience of both these poems, are people who have lost someone close...

In Seamus Heaney’s poem, “Blackberry-Picking”, an interpretation of the poem could lead one to believe that the poem is elegy to the children who will grow up and be made rotten by the world over time. The message is captured in Heaney’s feelings...

In Seamus Heaney’s poem, The Forge, an interpretation of the poem could lead one to believe that the poem is a commentary on the uncertainty of what lies ahead in the relationship between a person and religion. The mystery of what lies ahead is...

To bridge the gap between the inner and outer self, Heaney in "Badgers" evokes a sense of fear through the use of various techniques - namely, through the symbolism of the badgers themselves. What the badgers truly represent is open to...

Seamus Heaney’s “Casualty” is written as an elegy for a friend who was killed in a bombing in Northern Ireland shortly after Bloody Sunday. His friend, who was a Catholic, failed to obey a curfew set in place by the Irish Republican Army. He was...

“Requiem for the Croppies”, written by Seamus Heaney in 1962, describes the Irish Rebellion of 1798 as seen through the eyes and narrative voice of one random, deceased Irish soldier. The term “croppies” refers to the rebels, attributable to their...

Seamus Heaney’s poem “Digging,” an eight-stanza poem written in free verse, is the first in his collection of poems entitled Death of a Naturalist, which was published in 1966. Written in first-person narrative, this circularly structured poem...

Seamus Heaney and Sylvia Plath are two contemporary poets from very different family backgrounds. Heaney grew up rooted in rural Ireland with a close-knit large family, and Plath grew up in a dislocated family with her mother and brother. Her...

Two of Seamus Heaney's poems that rely on the shifts in language to create meaning are “The Strand at Lough Beg” and “Casualty”, both from his Field Work (1979) Anthology. Both poems revolve around the effects of sectarian violence in Ireland...

The poem “Punishment” by Seamus Heaney was written in 1975 as a part of the anthology North. It is a part of Heaney’s bog series, in which he describes the Irish bogland, and the different artifacts and remains that have been found within the...

Seamus Heaney paints a picture of Ireland through his poems, at times describing its culture and at other times its politics. In poems like 'Digging' and 'The Follower' he ascribes a sense of dignity to the act of farming, comparing it to the art...

Seamus Heaney wrote poems on a wide variety of subjects; from reflecting on his experiences with nature as a child to a period of political turmoil that plagued Ireland in the early 20th century called the “Troubles.” Some of his poems address...

Both ‘Before you were mine’ by Carol Anne Duffy and ‘Follower’ by Seamus Heaney present the theme of admiration through their poems. As they both capture the parent-child relationship through the child’s perspective showcasing how they each viewed...

Seamus Heaney’s ‘Mid Term Break’ and ‘In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge’ lament needless violence, as well as the one-dimensional and euphemistic way with which general society deals with the loss of innocent, pure lives, whether it be a personal...

The universal image of childhood that is ‘rang[ing]’ frogspawn on ‘window-sills’, ‘wait[ing] and watch[ing]’, with a fervent curiosity and admiration, until the ‘fattening dots’ dynamically metamorphose into ‘nimble swimming tadpoles’ is one, very...

‘Funeral Rites’ examines the role of rituals and ‘customary rhythms’ in the ‘arbitration of the feud’ in an Ireland plagued by the incongruous notion of ‘neighbourly murder’. However, in preference to the sterility of ‘tainted rooms’ in which the...

In ‘Requiem for the Croppies’, Heaney presents the reader with a stark image; the ‘broken wave’ that ‘soak[s]’ the ‘hillside’. The ‘broken wave’ evokes a sense of an anti-climax, as a wave may gather momentum, reach its peak, and eventually roll...

‘The Tollund Man’, as is his ‘sad freedom’, seems tellingly paradoxical in death – ‘naked’ and exposed, yet somehow venerated as a ‘trove’ and a ‘bridegroom to the goddess’. He is destroyed, but elevated as a sacred symbol of serenity after this...

In his critically acclaimed collection North, contemporary Irish poet Seamus Heaney reveals a very personal side of himself and of his identity as a writer. Although each individual poem explores its own storyline and employs its own metaphors,...

One of the most universally acknowledged beliefs states that there is no bond as strong, forgiving, and irreplaceable as a mother’s love for her child. On the contrary, poet Seamus Heaney challenges this conviction throughout his poem “Bye-Child”...