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Seamus Heaneys Senseof Place ] 31
manner for a "marriage between the geographical country and the country of
the mind.”' Itis this relationship that Heaney finds the central element of the
experience of place and its expression in poetry.
Heaney’s own poetry is generally seen as strongly grounded in place, es¬
pecially due to his early poems that are deeply rooted in his experience of the
environment of the family farm. References to places are present throughout
his poetry although his poem titles include such spatial elements on a much
less frequent basis than they can be found in the poetry of his contemporaries
Michael Longley or Derek Mahon. While some titles explicitly name locations,
offering clearly defined and delineated places, there are several instances in
which the evoked locations are generic rather than specific. Such places are
introduced with features that tend to be indicative of certain phenomena
rather than being characterised by concrete and specific details of the given
location, and such places tend to remain unnamed beyond their rather general
geographical marker that merely provides a broad orientation for the type of
place that is evoked in the text of the poem.
Mossbawn is the setting of several of Heaney’s poems, especially the ear¬
ly ones, due to its function as the formative environment of his childhood.
Despite its underlying presence, there is little description of the place itself
in traditional terms - what is presented is more of a metonymic relation be¬
tween the described events and routines and the place, which suggests the
unconscious and lived experience of place rather than the learned one when
assessed against the two ways Heaney outlines at the beginning of his essay.
Although the connection between the speaker of the poems dealing with the
experience of the place and the place itself is subtle and deep, Heaney does not
attempt to create a conventional pastoral impression of the country location
and his vision is not altered by affection towards the place stemming from
its significance as the family home. Heaney’s interpretation retains a balance
between the pastoral potential of the place and its actual features that include
the hardships which characterise agricultural realities, and there are several
instances in which the latter outweigh the former. The experience is subject¬
ed to reflection but the speaker’s point of view preserves its essentially naive
position that does not process the tackled information in a sophisticated in¬
terpretive framework informed by learning.
The name Mossbawn only appears explicitly in one poem title and even
that is symbolically situated: the dedicatory opening poems of the volume
North create what Michael Parker terms “a past perfected, a tangible world of
warmth, solidarity and almost mellow fruitfulness.”™ As the collection was
written in another well-documented location of Heaney’s life, the isolated
cottage of Glanmore, the dedicatory poems imply an intention of linking the
current location with a pastoral-like evocation of a golden age of a Northern
elsewhere that sharply contrasts both with the actualities of the Troubles and
10 Heaney, Preoccupations, 132
4 Michael Parker, Seamus Heaney. The Making of the Poet (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), 126