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
"5 Only then can the peninsula fill itself with the "marks". Therefore, the journey into the darkness becomes a nocturnal and somnambulistic encounter of the man and his apprehension of the land left behind. 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. "Land without marks" is a silent landscape which awaits to be heard, to be learned anew. annot avoid the conclusion that in a manner of speaking both the place and the man are inarticulate. 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. "6 1 Blake Morrison, "Seamus Heaney", Methuen London and New York (1987), p. The man and the place are inseparably combined with each other, even though the link between them is significantly weakened . "Things founded clean on their own shapes" are the final result of the "marriage between the geographical country and the country of the mind". His responsibility is to acknowledge the claims of silence and the claims of speech. It seems to be the metaphor of the poet finding his voice and overcoming the various blocks. 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. 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". 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. 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.
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Acceptance Essays
