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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 constituents. 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 reflection 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, targeting 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 transforms 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 imprint 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 comprehension of the recollected experience as the act of dispensing with words suggests 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 categories. 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 con24 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
