Seamus Heaney

“I began as a poet when my roots were crossed with my reading”1 Heaney once said. These roots were the fields of Irish bog that were “the memory of the landscape”.2 From an early age Heaney was absorbed by the family farm, playing in its barn and the surrounding fields, with an imagination that was schooled in traditional English. Heaney tells us in the poem ‘Digging’ that he wasn’t going to follow in what was tradition to do what his father and father had before him becoming farmers. Heaney uses the metaphor of the spade as a pen to tell us that the pen would be the chosen tool of his trade saying “I'll dig with it”. While Heaney’s early poetry aimed to offer an objective evaluation of what he called home, the countryside of County Derry, and his reactions to it, some of Heaney’s work could be seen as political poetry.

‘Clearances’ is a sequence of sonnets from The Haw Lantern 1987 commemorating his mother who died in 1984. The notion of ‘Clearance’ is one that features notably in The Haw Lantern. In the poem ‘From the Frontier of Writing’ we read about the “waiting on the squawk of clearance” 7 with ‘The Haw Lantern’ juxtaposed next where we read of the “blood-prick that you wish would test and clear you”.8 The first clearance relates to an approval while the latter relates to being made free. However, in these sonnets Heaney again is referring to something different. Some may draw comparisons to the idea of clearance touched on Larkin’s line “Such attics cleared of me! Such Absences!” from the poem ‘Absences’, but Heaney’s direction in these sonnets is