Oldal 35 [35]
Seamus Heaneys Sense of Place | 33
to the evoked places, their identity is communicated through their names,
and the places are thus seen in a personal perspective that is more culturally
oriented than spatially defined. The names are examined for their sound and
their communal significance as mediators of a history that is partly private,
through the speaker’s presentation of his own relation to them, and partly
shared and public, as they serve to bind the locals into a privileged community
of possessors of that heritage which is preserved in the names. As a result,
they do not reflect the speaker’s general sense of place in a methodical man¬
ner, unlike the poems dealing with Mossbawn or Glanmore, and the poems
remain exercises of cultural repossession in which the chosen places become
vehicles for the act by virtue of their names. “Anahorish” serves as an illus¬
tration of how this individual process of initiation into the tradition unfolds,
beginning with the personal experience of the location to the uncovering of
the legendary subtext of the name as the speaker learns its original meaning,
and how that eventually alters his evocation of the place as a repossessed cul¬
tural item.
Heaney returns to some of these places in later poems with an altered focus,
which offers complementation to the image of the respective places by more
specified elements, temporal as well as spatial. “Toome’” has later companions
that situate the poem and its referent in a broader and thus shifting context
as the later poems provide details that reveal more about the place itself than
the appeal of its name for the speaker. The poem “The Toome Road” recalls a
not unusual Troubles scene of camouflaged army vehicles passing in convoy
interpreted by the speaker as a violent intrusion into the normal course of life
of the peaceful countryside. The presumed peace of the early morning scene
is disrupted by the arrival of the military convoy, and the speaker’s decision
to open his account of the episode by a picture of the soldiers highlights their
alien status in what would normally look like an idyllic location. Although the
subsequent description of the countryside is composed of details that suggest
the traditional world of rural peace, the opening image of the intruders denies
the possibility of realising the potentially peaceful image of the location, and
the poem remains determined by the sense of tension resulting from the clash
of the local and the invader. As Michael Parker notes, the poem approximates
the sonnet form yet its internal tension does not allow for the neat organi¬
sation required by the form and is thus manipulated to include the speaker’s
expression of defiance'? which is expressed on the conceptual as well as the
formal level. The extra three lines that are added to the end of the poem final¬
ly focus on the image of the omphalos which indicates a fusion of the two ways
of knowing the place: the lived one stems from the speakers being situated in
the place, whereas the learned one arises from the link with the literary tradi¬
tion manifesting in the use of the phrase in that particular context.
A marked shift can be observed in the poem “At Toomebridge” as Heaney
revisits the place for the opening of the volume Electric Light. Although Ruben
14 cf. Parker, Seamus Heaney. The Making of the Poet, 158-159