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Moi refers to the poem as a “poetic parasite on Nationalist grounds, historical
events and Heaney’s own poetry””», there is a more profound facet of the poem
that clarifies the speaker’s relation with the place focused on. The title already
demarcates a clearly identified location, reflecting precise and accurate po¬
sitioning, and the descriptive details include spatial as well as temporal el¬
ements, which suggests a profound familiarity with the place as well as hints
at the combination of space and time in the concept of place.!f The speaker
uses past tenses for the descriptions, for the geographical fact of the water of
the lake draining off through the river as well as for the historical elements
mentioned; the present tense is used to describe only the intangible potential
of the place to provide inspiration. The poem concludes with an explicit shift
in the poetic sensibility of the speaker as the former lure of the eel of Lough
Neagh as inspiration is replaced by another aspect of the place, the “negative
ions in the open air.”'” This, however, is not without ambiguity as the open
air is more loosely associated with any particular place and it points beyond
the historical dimension that is suggested by the use of the past tense. This
shift is eventually all the more significant if all three poems are considered as
it indicates a full itinerary from the human element of the name of the place
through the actual physical experience of the location to the nearly mystical
experience the negative ions imply.
Anahorish is another location which recurs in a later poem with a different
focus and a reconsidered context. In “Anahorish” it is the name that holds
the attention of the speaker, the etymology and the personal meaning of the
name are explored, and the place is evoked rather than described through a
rather small number of details that could actually represent any country loca¬
tion. In the poem “Anahorish 1944” the temporal marker shifts the attention
from the potential focus carried by the place name in the title, and the poem
presents more of a tableau than a description of the place. The scene, how¬
ever, suggests a complementary image to the place as actual location as the
rudimentary sketch of the landscape is populated by a group of locals watch¬
ing soldiers passing through the land on their way to Normandy. There is a
tangible sense of awkwardness created by the reversal of the situation as the
local inhabitants come from pig slaughter and the soldiers are the travelling
witnesses: in the poem it is the quiet countryside which functions as the scene
of violence and the locals are the killers, whereas the soldiers represent order
and discipline as they are marching through the area from which they remain
essentially detached. There is a delicately juxtaposed image of “sunlight and
gutter blood”, and although the latter is the marker of bloodshed of a dif¬
ferent kind, as the speaker focuses on the familiar exercise of the local scene
Ruben Moi, .”’The cure by poetry that cannot be coerced’: Text, Canon and Context in Seamus
Heaney’s Electric Light”. In: Ashby Bland Crowder and Jason David Hall (eds.) Seamus Heaney. Poet,
Critic, Translator (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 174
places as “spatio-temporal events”, cf. Doreen Massey, for space (London: Sage, 2005), 130
17 Seamus Heaney, Electric Light (London: Faber, 2001), 3
18 Seamus Heaney, District and Circle (London: Faber, 2006), 7