Seamus Heaney's "Peninsula"

A detailed Summary of Seamus Heaney's "Peninsula"

Seamus Heaney is widely believed to be one of the finest poets currently active. "To call him the most important Irish poet since Yeats has become something of a cliche."1 One of his poems, "Peninsula", published in the collection "Door into the Dark", is one example of many which constitute a broad image illustrating a split that Heaney as an Irish poet apparently experienced, a split between "the illiterate self that was tied to the little hills and earthed in the stony gray soil, and the literate self"2.

A poem, in the very first sentence, introduces a concept of inarticulacy: "When you have nothing more to say, just drive". When a poet finds himself in a position of being unable to express himself, when there is a silence inside of him, he has to give in to the silence and set out on a journey round the peninsula. The peninsula, which, by the definition is simply a narrow strip of land projecting into a sea or lake from the mainland, is not any peninsula. It is a "land without marks" which embodies Irish landscape - the land of the "silence", the old ancestral places.

Taking into consideration John Montague's words that "the whole of the Irish landscape is a manuscript which we have lost the skill to read"3, one c

1 Blake Morrison, "Seamus Heaney", Methuen London and New York (1987), p.11

3 John Montague (cited in) "The Sense of Place", (lecture given in the Ulster Museum, January 1977)

ulacy and articulation. His responsibility is to acknowledge the claims of silence and the claims of speech.

The peninsula itself is also not merely any part of the landscape. Its shape, causing isolation from the mainland also seems significant as it reaches far into the waters, establishing the bridge between the known and unknown. It seems to be the metaphor of the poet finding his voice and overcoming the various blocks. When the act of the unification between the poet and the nature "in the dark" is accomplished, there is a balance between the poet's "selves", and a peninsula is no longer a geographical term, but the "water and ground in their extremity". "Things founded clean on their own shapes" are the final result of the "marriage between the geographical country and the country of the mind". The "Peninsula", therefore, is a very "accurate image of visual perception", acknowledging the remark made by Carson McCullers, an American writer of the South that "to know who you are, you have to have a place to come from."6

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Approximate Word count = 1175
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Miscellaneous

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Seamus Heaney's "Peninsula"

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