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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 manner, 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 illustration 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 cultural 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 organisation 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 finally 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 tradition 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
