Page 37 [37]
OCR
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 manner 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 introducing 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 setting of several Heaney poems in the volumes Wintering Out and North. While Heaney’s interest in the bog is eventually archaeologically, and in turn anthropologically, 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 vertical structure. What appears spatially identical, apart from the layers being superimposed on one another in a seemingly endless sequence, shows a temporal 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
