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Seamus Heaneys Sense of Place | 37
unspecified beyond its designation as a peninsula, and the lack of descriptive
details suggests the importance of its generic nature as a marginal location
which is defined by the inseparable coexistence and interaction of its consti¬
tuents. The liminal character of the coast is mirrored in the speaker’s idea of
a state of transition: “you will not arrive // But pass through”,™ which is a re¬
flection of the coastal process of the constant movement of the water in spite
of its apparently stationary position in relation to the land and the very idea
of the coast itself, being a constantly shifting zone rather than a clear line of
demarcation. There is a precondition for the experience: it is to be undertaken
“[wlhen you have nothing more to say”,”° which suggests the need for a broad
range of sensory apparatus to be employed but the exclusion of language, tar¬
geting the experience proper, requiring pure reception. The time frame is also
defined: a full day is the appropriate duration to observe the landscape in its
entirety, so that the experience can encompass both space and time in the
required manner to fully realise the sense of place. While the duration is a
whole day, two specific parts of the day are explicitly mentioned: dusk trans¬
forms the sight, whereas darkness requires the observer to recall what has
been seen. This suggests the necessity of a likewise liminal temporal element
for the vision to work since dusk represents the transition between light and
darkness, and the arrival of darkness compels the retrieval of a mental im¬
print of the formerly contemplated sight, which is eventually a transformed
and transposed experience, thus eventually a product of the observer’s mind.
The conclusion of the poem offers a quasi-Wordsworthian benefit of the
experience as a code for reading landscapes. The basis of this reading of the
experience is the essentially self-defining nature of the observed details
understood as pure phenomena, “things founded clean on their own shapes”
which is beyond words. This, however, involves the ambiguity of the compre¬
hension of the recollected experience as the act of dispensing with words sug¬
gests the suspension of the colouring of the imagination for the presentation
of that experience, and even before that the dismissal of language calls into
question the translation of the sight into comprehensible intellectual terms.
If the repeated insistence of the speaker on having “nothing to say””’
sidered as the lived and unconscious way of knowing a place, the potential of
the experience to enable the observer to “uncode all landscapes”” reflects the
learned and conscious way, thus the poem apparently fuses Heaney’s two cat¬
egories. This fusion, however, retains an ambiguous element if the requirement
of leaving words, that is, language, out of the response to the experience while
facing it is accepted, thus the question of the meaning of the sight remains
unresolved since it is not made clear whether that meaning is discovered or
constructed.
is con¬
24 Heaney, Door into the Dark, 21
25 Heaney, Door into the Dark, 21
6 Heaney, Door into the Dark, 21
27 Heaney, Door into the Dark, 21
8 Heaney, Door into the Dark, 21