Heaney and the Catharsis of Freedom Jack Duckett 12th Grade

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 over, possessing a great power and destructive force. Here however, this wave is ‘broken’, cleaved and interrupted before it attains its full potential. This conveys a bitterness, a disappointment, and a sense of wasted opportunity, as the effort that went into generating this underground movement, or ‘wave’, against the oppressive British rule in Ireland in the late 18th century, is nullified by one terrible, contrastingly sudden ‘final conclave’. The sibilant assonance of this same line (‘the hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave’), is an aural image that captures the onomatopoeic sloshing sound of the ‘wave’ of blood, and this presents the reader with a confronting image; of soldiers splashing around in the blood of their own comrades, continuously being slaughtered, to emphasize the true horror and scale of this disaster. The reader is peppered with many other shocking images, such as the bodies that are ‘terraced’ in their ‘thousands’, which suggests that the battleground is...