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. Therefore, the journey into the darkness becomes a nocturnal and somnambulistic encounter of the man and his apprehension of the land left behind. Being "in the dark again" is like shedding the screen distorting reality and looking at the place from the depth of within, recalling the land as it really is, seen with the eyes of the various traders, labourers and craftsmen who unlike the poet are lacking in speech. 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. 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. The man and the place are inseparably combined with each other, even though the link between them is significantly weakened . "The Sense of Place", Seamus Heaney, lecture given in the Ulster Museum, January 1977. "5 Only then can the peninsula fill itself with the "marks". His responsibility is to acknowledge the claims of silence and the claims of speech. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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