Oldal 36 [36]
OCR
34 | Peter Dolmänyos 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 positioning, and the descriptive details include spatial as well as temporal elements, 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 location. 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, however, suggests a complementary image to the place as actual location as the rudimentary sketch of the landscape is populated by a group of locals watching 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 different 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
