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Seamus Heaney’s Sense of Place | 35
and expresses his ignorance of the destination of the soldiers, the broader
historical dimension of the war is only an unseen elsewhere that would be
understood later in hindsight. The image of the passing soldiers tossing “gum
and tubes of coloured sweets”” to the locals, however, retains its ambiguous
nature as the generosity of the soldiers can be seen as a genuine trait as well
as an indication of their ultimate resignation in the face of what awaits them
in the war. The ambiguity is further emphasised by the typography of the
poem as the whole text is printed between quotation marks, which suggests
a reported piece - yet the identity of the speaker remains undisclosed in the
poem. While the past tense used for the narration indicates a recalled image
of the episode, its time is not specified either, which leaves the temporal gap
between the recalled scene and its retelling undetermined and consequently
irrelevant since it is the episode itself whose nature is scrutinised. The man¬
ner of the account, however, reflects a delicate shift in terms of the relation
with the place as the inclusion of the name in the title of the poem with the
temporal marker contains an allusion to Heaney’s own earlier act of intro¬
ducing Anahorish into the learned and literate tradition that can affect the
reader’s way of knowing and cherishing place.
Ihe concept of sense of place does not extend only to named locations
since several of Heaney’s poems evoke particular places without naming them
with explicit precision. One such unnamed type of place is the bog, the set¬
ting of several Heaney poems in the volumes Wintering Out and North. While
Heaney’s interest in the bog is eventually archaeologically, and in turn an¬
thropologically, informed, his fascination with the geographic and geologic
aspects of the bog preceded his later focus on the figures found in the bog.
The early poem “Bogland”, which tentatively establishes the bog as the Irish
analogy of the American prairie as a spatial foundation of community, defines
the bog as a complex of layers not only of space but of time as well in its ver¬
tical structure. What appears spatially identical, apart from the layers being
superimposed on one another in a seemingly endless sequence, shows a tem¬
poral difference when explored by excavation and extraction, which turns the
bog into a repository of a rich historical heritage as well as an intriguing type
of landscape. The bog is space as process per se with the paradox of constant
change underlying apparent stability, pivoting on the word “ground”:
The ground itself is kind, black butter
Melting and opening underfoot,
Missing its last definition
By millions of years.?°
19 Heaney, District and Circle, 7
20 Seamus Heaney, Door into the Dark (London: Faber, 1969), 55