Seamus Heaney's "Peninsula"
Seamus Heaney is widely believed to be one of the finest poets currently active. "To call him the most important Irish poet since Yeats has become something of a cliche."1 One of his poems, "Peninsula", published in the collection "Door into the Dark", is one example of many which constitute a broad image illustrating a split that Heaney as an Irish poet apparently experienced, a split between "the illiterate self that was tied to the little hills and earthed in the stony gray soil, and the literate self"2. A poem, in the very first sentence, introduces a concept of inarticulacy: "When you have nothing more to say, just drive". When a poet finds himself in a position of being unable to express himself, when there is a silence inside of him, he has to give in to the silence and set out on a journey round the peninsula. The peninsula, which, by the definition is simply a narrow strip of land projecting into a sea or lake from the mainland, is not any peninsula. It is a "land without marks" which embodies Irish landscape - the land of the "silence", the old ancestral places. Taking into consideration John Montague's words that "the whole of the Irish landscape is a manuscript which we have lost the skill to read"3, one c
"Land without marks" is a silent landscape which awaits to be heard, to be learned anew. "Seamus Heaney, 44 wiersze", Stanisław Barańczak , Wydawnictwo znak, Krakow 19952. "Things founded clean on their own shapes" are the final result of the "marriage between the geographical country and the country of the mind". It appears that it is necessary to !celebrate the world, the secret source of power, so that, in turn, it would guide and sanction the poet's craft. "4 It seems that Heaney as an Irish poet is not only a poet but a medium and that the notion of the language works through the medium of the author rather than the author through language. The marks signify here not only the names on the map but also the voice of the peninsula, the marks of the language of those who are lacking in speech, as belonging to the Irish culture denotes being part of the "silent ancestry". His responsibility is to acknowledge the claims of silence and the claims of speech. 275 Seamus Heaney, "The Sense of Place", (lecture given in the Ulster Museum, January 1977)6 Carson McCullers, (cited in) "The Sense of Place", (lecture given in the Ulster Museum, January 1977) ------------------------------------------------------------------------**Bibliography**BIBLIOGRAPHY:1. When the act of the unification between the poet and the nature "in the dark" is accomplished, there is a balance between the poet's "selves", and a peninsula is no longer a geographical term, but the "water and ground in their extremity". The fact results in preventing a man from arriving at any specifically named place but instead makes one "pass through" the land, without hearing the voices of ancestors speaking through nature. Therefore a role of a poet, of the articulate representative of the "silent ancestry" is to find the balance between the silence and the speech, between inartic!ulacy and articulation. This state, however, does not only signify a kind of momentary lack of ideas or lack of words. It seems to be the metaphor of the poet finding his voice and overcoming the various blocks. Heaney's works often remind one that until recently Ireland ha!s been the only country in Northern Europe to retain something approaching a genuinely peasant culture, and the traditions and rituals of that culture. Entering into the darkness seems to be the only way of looking into the natural processes of country life, into the dark interior of earth, nature, nature's forms and the rituals man has created upon them.
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