Oldal 38 [38]
36 | Peter Dolmänyos
The exploration of the bog is thus a likewise temporal mission with the un¬
covered elements providing a near-mystical result:
Our pioneers keep striking
Inwards and downwards,
Every layer they strip
Seems camped on before.
The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.
The wet centre is bottomless.”
The realisation of the repeated discovery of an earlier layer immediately below
the currently explored one coupled with the constantly evolving nature of the
bog eventually fuses the two ways of approaching place since the experience
of the physical exercise of uncovering is complemented by the recognition of
the historical and cultural heritage of the uncovered site.
Heaney’s poems dealing with the bog bodies preserve this understanding
of the bog and build on its implicit presence as the spatial context of his mo¬
tif. As the bog poems focus on the underlying mythic element the discovered
bodies uncover, the location itself is less prominent as an explicit presence in
the texts. In the final piece of the sequence of the bog poems, entitled “Kin¬
ship”, in the volume North, however, there is close attention paid to the place
with its directly experienced features: Heaney’s speaker explores the bog as
actual location, connecting his sensory experience with a broad range of cul¬
tural aspects associated with the bog, which eventually testifies to the simul¬
taneous and essentially complementary presence of both the instinctive and
the learned understanding of place. ”*
A number of unnamed locations involve the coast and employ a broadly
generic approach that provides descriptive items which appear ubiquitous
rather than definitive of a particular identifiable place. The frontier-like na¬
ture of the coast marks a zone of continuous interaction between land and
water, each relying on proper definition for the other, and this marginally po¬
sitioned dynamic environment of constant conflict and change facilitates vi¬
sion or revelation as a result. Daniel Tobin calls attention to Heaney’s frequent
use of the “solitary driver” image in several poems linked to specific places,”
yet perhaps this is more accurately understood as a solitary observer figure,
either a driver or a pedestrian, who is placed in such locations to experience
what the place imprints on him.
The experience presented in the poem “The Peninsula’ is set in such a situ¬
ation with a solitary observing character in a coastal setting. The place itself is
21 Heaney, Door into the Dark, 55-56
for aspects of Heaney’s treatment of the bog motif see Péter Dolmanyos, “Present Buried in the Past.
The Bog Poems of Seamus Heaney.” The Anachronist 2001. pp. 120-143
Daniel Tobin, Passage to the Center. Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney. (Lexing¬
ton: The University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 45