Warm Eggs

Seamus Heaney reflects upon his collection Wintering Out in an interview, mentioning that it is "comfortless enough but with a notion of survival in it." In the poem "Servant Boy," Heaney demonstrates one individual's suffering through manipulation of language. He utilizes repetition to recreate the servant's trail of hardship, while infusing it with the recurring prospect of survival. Through repetition of language and imagery Heaney draws the reader into the highly personal reality of one oppressed individual. The boy's voice is filled with resentment, yet Heaney consistently restores his misery with hopeful imagery.

The poem begins with the pronoun he, yet as it continues, Heaney magnetically draws deeper into the servant's trail with the repetition of you, connecting to the boy's experience. Repetition of your and you in the third stanza carefully weaves the structure of the stanza together, creating a physical trail of rhythmic fluidity throughout the stanza:

"and kept your patience
and your counsel, how
you draw me into
your trail. Your trail (9-12)."

The passage has a steady pace that reflects the boy's trudging and perseverance through a hard winter. Furthermore, it ends in confidence, indicating that this is the boy's trail (Your trail), and he has authority over it. This is his tribulation, but additionally his chance to triumph. The patience and steady pacing also reinforces Heaney's own equanimity in regard to the conflict in Ireland, as he only meant to "gesture towards the distresses."

Repetition of hopeful imagery brightens all of the darker images that seem initially to overwhelm the poem. Beginning a poem with the "back-end of a bad-year" seems to be the most dismal and depressing means to start. Yet, the next image of a hurricane-lamp shines a metaphorical light through the servant's darkness and provides a message of inspiration that the end of his troubles is nearing. After the trail of the third stanza physically breaks, "broken from haggard to stable (13)," the boy's difficult trail has stabilized. This positive shift to stability is supported by the "snow," conjuring a fresh and new start, as well as the "first-footing," indicating a new step in a changed direction. The poem ends with the servant carrying warm eggs, a final and solidifying symbol of rebirth and entrance into a freer and more comfortable existence.

Heaney, Seamus "Mother Ireland." The Listener: December 7, 1972. (page 790)

Heaney, Seamus: Opened Ground. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.

Working within the Political and Literary Tradition: Seamus Heaney’s “Bog Oak”

Heather Kroes

Despite the advent of the Troubles, the themes in Heaney’s collection “Wintering Out” remain overwhelming pastoral. However, his poems have an underlying question: As a citizen and a poet, how can Heaney stay true to his literary tradition but also reflect on the political turmoil that surrounds him? In his poem “Bog Oak” Heaney speaks to this dichotomy and reveals, through comparison with a historical figure, that the lines are at once ambiguous and polarizing.

The title of the poem, “Bog Oak,” as well as the first stanza stay true to the pastoral expressions characteristic of Heaney’s work. Bog Oak is a type of wood that has been preserved in the bog. Heaney describes it as a “carter’s trophy” (1). By characterizing the wood in terms of Ireland’s colonial past, the bog oak becomes literally and figuratively a kind of artifact of that time. It in turn evokes the “moustached/ dead” (7-8) and “creel-fillers” (8). The physical remnants of Ireland’s colonial past recall the people that occupied that time. Unlike the bog oak, these past people are very detached from the narrator. Instead of being able to share a common historical path, the narrator is an outsider who “might tarry” (6) or “eavesdrop on” (9) these manifestations of the past.

The reason is revealed in the fourth and fifth stanzas: “rain/ blurs the far end/ of the cart track” (13-15) and “The softening ruts/ lead back to no/ ‘oak groves’” (16-18) Time has all but wiped out the artifacts of that age; what remains are the literary and political histories of the place. In the sixth stanza the narrator can “just make out/ Edmund Spenser” (21-22) who is best known for not only his epic poem “Faerie Queene” which glorifies the Tudor monarchy in England but also an inflammatory pamphlet entitled A View on the Present State of Ireland which called for, among other things, the destruction of the Irish culture and language.

The poem depicts Spenser the poet, “dreaming sunlight” (23), but “encroached upon by/ geniuses” (24-25) who come “‘out of every corner/ of the woodes and glennes’” (27-28). While Spenser is first introduced as a purely literary figure, he is being “encroached upon” (24) by not only the traditional Irish inhabitants but also by the quotations from his political pamphlet. By sketching a Spenser whose political views are articulated from his poetic voice, Heaney displays how closely the political and the literary are intertwined.

What is so interesting about this poem is Heaney’s handling of the English tradition and particularly the ambiguity he feels about writing about the Irish Troubles. From his quatrain format, to the references to Ireland’s unremembered colonial past, to the submersion of Spenser the politician and poet, Heaney provides a comparative depiction of the overlapping of the English tradition in literature and politics that he belongs to by nature of his vocation and place of origin.

Use of Language in Heaney’s “Fodder” - Caitlin Etherton

Seamus Heaney uses language to enrich, in many ways, the poems of his 1972 collection “Wintering Out.” In his poem “Fodder,” Heaney shows the deep meaning behind a simple farming chore. It is his use of language, his chosen discourse and his word choice, that allows him to do this.
Heaney mixes agricultural and religious discourse as he describes the task of unloading fodder for livestock. He describes in detail the process of unloading fodder, of drawing the loads with tight clamps etc. (Heaney 5-16). However, instead of continuing the farmer’s discourse to describe the bundles of hay, Heaney writes that they are, “multiple as loaves and fishes” (Heaney 13-14). This is in reference to the Gospel story of Jesus and his disciples feeding the five thousand with only five loaves of bread and two fish. They miraculously stretched a seemingly limited supply to sustain a large group of people. And so the idea of survival is extended beyond merely nourishing the livestock, and becomes in reference to people. “Wintering Out” is an Irish phrase for making it through the winter, for surviving. This is not just the title of the collection, but the topic of this poem. Heaney’s reference to the Gospel can be looked into even further to understand his approach with language and poetry and this theme of survival.
The reason for this hungry mass of five thousand people congregating, was Jesus’ teaching. Interestingly, in many of these teachings Jesus used pastoral images and even agriculture to get his point across. This type of agricultural discourse made his messages understandable to people on that common level of society. Similarly, Heaney’s use of agricultural discourse is understood by the people of Ireland, a place where 64% of the total land area is devoted to agriculture (Irish Agriculture). The audience familiar with the subject already, Heaney can then extend their thinking to realize that he is talking about much more than a chore. Heaney’s word choice is what reveals this deeper meaning.
It is the last stanza of “Fodder” where Heaney really expands his subject. He writes, “These long nights / I would pull hay / for comfort, anything / to bed the stall” (17-20). On the surface level, the speaker in the poem is just pulling hay down to make the stalls more comfortable for the livestock. Upon re-examining the word “stall” though, one realizes that Heaney may not be talking just about the stall in the barn, but a different kind of stall. And in turn, he is not talking about the comfort of the animal, but the comfort of the speaker as a result of his chore. Another meaning of the word “stall” is a standstill, even further, “a ruse to deceive or delay” (Merriam-Webster). Looking from line 18 to line 19, Heaney writes, “I would pull hay for comfort.” In Northern Ireland in 1972, in a place of violence and unrest, habitual activities such as unloading hay became a comfort. They made life seem more ordinary and predictable in a time when, “the explosions literally rattle your window day and night” (Heaney Preoccupations 34). Heaney is expounding on how people cope with the Troubles, or possibly any life stress. Stalling is just as much a part of survival, of “wintering out.” Rather than sitting in fear between different incidences of bombing, the stall of time between explosions is bedded, eased by the performance of habitual tasks that make life seem more normal. In America we are obsessed with the extreme, the most risqué, the most violent, the most shocking. In Ireland in the 1970’s, daily life was a state of shock, so instead they anticipated the mundane, the comforting, the predictable. It is not just the bundle of hay that the speaker opens his arms for in the beginning of the poem (Heaney 1-4). It is the safe practice of unloading it. And so, it is appropriate that Heaney ends the first poem of his collection on survival, with the word and image of a “stall,” a place of comfort and rest and also an avenue to comfort and rest in a time of great trouble.


Heaney, Seamus. Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996. New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1998.

Heaney, Seamus. Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978. New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1980.

Irish Agriculture and Food Development Authority. Agriculture in Ireland. 17 Feb. 2008

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“Stall.” Def.5. Merriam-Webster Dictionary. 11th ed. 2007-2008.

Mahon on the Pulpit

The troubles in Ireland all stem from the tension between the pro-British Protestants and the pro-Irish Catholics. While both sides resorted to violence on many occasions, the Protestant group, the ones in power, was the more militant of the two sides. In “Ecclesiastes,” Mahon uses the language of a protestant preacher to mock, criticize and reject his Protestant, northern Irish identity and all those who fervently resort to sectarian violence.

Mahon wrote “Ecclesiastes” with varying line rhythm and in blank verse; however, the internal rhyme and alliteration increase the speed of the poem, charging it with the voice of a manic preacher orating to a crowd. The first three lines illustrate this effect well: “God, you could grow to love it, God-fearing, God- / chosen purist little puritan that, / for all your wiles and smiles…” (1-3). The four alliterating g sounds, along with the internal rhyme created by the repetition of ‘God’ in the first line, ‘purist’ and ‘puritan’, in the second, and “wiles and smiles” found in the third, work together to create the effect of an orating preacher. Of course, Mahon beginning the poem by taking the lord’s name in vain sets the reader up to understand that the poem will be anything but praise for the church.

Throughout the rest of the poem, Mahon continues to channel the oratory powers of a preacher to scathe the protestant church and culture. This ranges from the culture’s repressiveness of “the / dank churches, the empty streets,” to the faults of self-righteous beliefs: “and not / feel called upon to understand and forgive / but only to speak with a bleak afflatus,” and to finally the dogmatic protestant leaders that “stand on a corner stiff / with rhetoric, promising nothing under the sun” (3-5; 10-12; 21-22). Finally, in the last sentence, Mahon mirrors the first three lines closely by again repeating the word ‘God,’ and using a small internal rhyme in the last line. The effect of this is to give the poem one last emphatic charge before reaching the climax.

In conclusion, Mahon creates a dichotomy in “Ecclesiastes” between the oratory style of a preacher and the language he would use — namely by criticizing the church instead of teaching it’s beliefs. Mahon employs a multitude of literary devices from alliteration, internal rhyme, and allusion to create a scathing review of how he perceives the state of the protestant church. Ultimately concluding that it’s teaching offers “nothing under the sun” in worth.

Mahon, Derek. Collected Poems. Ed. Peter Fallon. Ireland: The Gallery Press, 1999.