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
The poet has to take the responsibility for reconstituting "the sense of place", which can be accomplished only through the "marriage between the geographical country and the country of the mind. Only then can "the glazed foreshore" or "the leggy birds stilted on their own legs" be seen as carrying the significance previously imperceptible for the man. 112 Blake Morrison, "Seamus Heaney", Methuen London and New York (1987), p. 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. According to Blake Morrison "Heaney feels torn between his roots and his reading, between words of the heart and hearth-language and the learned, public, socially acceptable language of school and salon. His responsibility is to acknowledge the claims of silence and the claims of speech. 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. 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. 283 John Montague (cited in) "The Sense of Place", (lecture given in the Ulster Museum, January 1977)4 Blake Morrison, "Seamus Heaney", Methuen London and New York (1987), p. "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. Plunging into the "dark" as well as looking into the depth of subconscious is the condition of understanding. "Things founded clean on their own shapes" are the final result of the "marriage between the geographical country and the country of the mind". Its shape, causing isolation from the mainland also seems significant as it reaches far into the waters, establishing the bridge between the known and unknown. 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. It is a state of mind of the poet who no longer hears the language of his place, the land he comes from, where his roots are.
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Acceptance Essays
