1. Abeer Basbos Areej Abu-Farah
Hiba Jaferah
PRESENTATION ON:
The Relationship between the Personal and
Political in Seamus Heaney’s Poetry
Supervised by: Mrs. Hanadi Younan
English 216

2. • He received the Nobel Prize in 1995.
• He was born in Northern Ireland
• He studied art and work as a teacher
• He grew up in a rural farm family

3. • He wrote “Digging” to show the
turning point in his life.
• He wrote the “Bog Poems” which
portray the violence in Ireland
• He wrote the “Act of Union” to
document the union of Ireland and
Britain.

4. Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge
deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands By
God, the old man could handle a spade
By God, the old man could handle a
spade
Just like his old man
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He
straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging
The cold smell of potato mould, the
squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head
But I’ve no spade to follow men like
them
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests
I’ll dig with it

5. • " Digging" shows the changing face of
Ireland, from a rural country to a
modern industrial country which
plays a role in identifies Heaney's
identity as a poet.

6. • "in a mood of nostalgia, the poet recalls vividly and
evocatively how his father and traditional community of
his grandfather farmed on land with spades as potato
farmers.
• Heaney creates a sense of historical continuity even
though he feels he cannot take his place with the
traditional laboring generations of his forefathers.
Still, he can honor his family and community on his
verse.
• "The smell of potato mould, the sucking sound of
walking in a damp land, awaken in the poet's mind
desire to track his ancestor's path but, he doesn't have
a spade. The pen became a spade" (26-29).

7. “Bog Queen", “Punishment”, “Strange Fruit” and “Cassandra” from
“Mycenae Lookout” depicts the suffering of the Irish girls due to the
traditions of the society and the political conflicts.

8. • The queen’s message is to call the Irish people to rise
up
•
Heaney has the hope of Ireland's rising and it appears
in the first line of his poem “I lay waiting” (1)
• “braille for the creeping influences.” (5-6) Kraemer
commented, "Her body was a kind of text read by
touch“
• The poet connects the body with the land and it's
frozen "like the nuzzle of fjords / at my thighs" (35-36).
• The body survives to rise again "and I rose from the
dark"(53)

9. • He illustrates the cruel punishment of a young woman
who was found killed in the Iron- age.
• He shows deep sympathy for the girl , in the first and
the third stanzas "I can feel the tug/…I can see you
drowned," (1-3) and in line 28 "My poor scapegoat“
• For Heaney there is no problem about the marriage
between Irish girl and British soldiers, but he can't
defend this idea because he would considered
betraying Ireland.
• In the lines "I who have stood dumb When your
betraying sisters" (36-37).

10. • Her broken nose is dark as a turf clod, Her
eyeholes blank as pools in the old workings.
Diodorus Siculus confessed His gradual ease
with the likes of this:
Murdered, forgotten, nameless, terrible
Beheaded girl, outstaring axe. (Heaney 7-12)

11. • “I’d dream of blood in bright webs in a
ford,/Of bodies raining down like tattered
meat/ On top of me asleep”. (Heaney 34)
• The king should have been told, but who was
there to tell him if not myself? I willed them
to cease and break the hold of my crosspurposed silence. (Heaney 41)

12. No such thing as
innocent
bystanding.
Her soiled
vest, her little
breasts, her
clipped, devastated, scabbed
punk head, the
char-eyed
famine gawk—
she looked campfucked
and simple.
People could feel

13. The First Stanza
1-To-night, a first movement, a pulse,
2-As if the rain in bog land gathered head
3-To slip and flood: a bog-burst,
4-A gash breaking open the ferny bed.
5-Your back is a firm line of eastern coast
6-And arms and legs are thrown
7-Beyond your gradual hills. I caress
8-The heaving province where our past has
grown.
9-I am the tall kingdom over your shoulder
10-hat you would neither cajole nor ignore.

14.  According to Antoinette Chan, the poet uses three
apostrophes in the first line in order to build up
suspense and tension to create a foreshadowing effect
on an event about to take place. This first line also
represents the sexual arousal between the ‘couple’.

15. The Second Stanza
15- And I am still imperially
16- Male, leaving you with pain,
17- The rending process in the colony,
18- The battering ram, the boom burst from
within.
19- The act sprouted an obsinate fifth column
20- Whose stance is growing unilateral.
21- His heart beneath your heart is a wardrum
22- Mustering force. His parasitical
23- And ignorant little fists already
24- Beat at your borders and I know they're
cocked
25- At me across the water. No treaty
26- I foresee will salve completely your tracked
27- And stretchmarked body, the big pain

16. • Heaney confirms on the sexual union between
England and Ireland.
• According to M. Armengol : “The sexual
relation between England and Ireland leads to
the creation of a child which represents the
union.” line (19-20).

17. • The BBC News commented :
• In 1975's Act Of Union, he took the map of
Britain and Ireland and turned it into an
image of a married couple lying in bed
together, Ireland surrounded and
mastered by the masculine Britain.

18.  Chan, Antoinette. "Written Analysis – Act of
Union." English@ESF. Tangient, n.d. Web. 05 Nov.
2013.
 Heaney, Seamus. North. London: Faber and
Faber, 1975. Print
 Heaney, Seamus. Preoccupations: Selected Prose 19681978. New York: Farrar, Straus. Print
 Heaney, Seamus. The Spirit Level. New York: The
Noonday Press, 1996. Print

19.  M. Armengol, Josep. Atlantis. 1st ed. Vol. 23. N.p.:
Aedean, 2001. Gendering The Irish
Land:
Seamus Heaney's "Act of Union"(1975). JSTOR. Web. 1
Nov. 2013.
<http://www.jstor.org/stable/41055006>.
 "Obituary: Seamus Heaney." BBC News. BBC, 30 Aug.
2013. Web. 05 Nov. 2013.
 "Punishment: Seamus Heaney - Summary and Critical
Analysis." N.p., n.d. Bachelorandmaster. Web. 20 Oct.
2013.