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
2. "Seamus Heaney", Blake Morrison, Methuen London and New York, 1987 Placing the poem into the broader context justifies discussing the conflict or meditation of speech and silence while reading into "Peninsula". According to Blake Morrison "Heaney feels torn between his roots and his reading, between words of the heart and hearth-language and the learned, public, socially acceptable language of school and salon."4 It seems that Heaney as an Irish poet is not only a poet but a medium and that the notion of the language works through the medium of the author rather than the author through language. The poet has to take the responsibility for reconstituting "the sense of place", which can be accomplished only through the "marriage between the geographical country and the country of the mind."5 Only then can the peninsula fill itself with the "marks". Only then can "the glazed foreshore" or "the leggy birds stilted on their own legs" be seen as carrying the significance previously imperceptible for the man. It appears that it is necessary to ! 3. "The Sense of Place", Seamus Heaney, lecture given in the Ulster Museum, January 1977 2 Blake Morrison, "Seamus Heaney", Methuen London and New York (1987), p. 28 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1 Blake Morrison, "Seamus Heaney", Methuen London and New York (1987), p.11 annot avoid the conclusion that in a manner of speaking both the place and the man are inarticulate. As the work of art can be claimed to be nonexistent until it is read, the same can be applied to a place, which until it is "uncoded", is inarticulate. "The land without marks" is a blank spot on the map full of marks, full of names. The fact results in preventing
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Approximate Word count = 1175
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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