from 'The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: All the Realms of Whisper' by Elmer Andrews; Lecturer in Extra-Mural Department, University of Ulster

draws on the battering vitality of the Anglo-Saxon alliterative tradition to give utterance to an imagination informed by the austerity of cold, plastering rains and sharp-toothed winds. It is a landscape which the Anglo-Saxon Wanderer or Seafarer would recognize. 152

clamor and clogging 159

tribulation is purifying. In hard times it is necessary to become hard too-- even traitorous. 160

sacral, archetypal and mythic resonances of experience. Heaney submits all to the dark. 160

morning field smells
read poems as prayers
'a marvelous lightship that will surface from muddied waters'
elver-gleams in the dark
hide-bound boundary tree 173

"S's only consort now, are the birds of the air...."
The First Flight
gannet's strike
camaraderie of rookeries
discovering his new zone of being through the various birds he encounters.

oisin and st. patrick vs. holly tree (ink)
lobe and larynx of the mossy places
the old dry glut
living like a rook in the air 180
unroofed tower....
rest balm wingflap
unpainted spaces

An Artists' sensuous delight in his wife is complicated by his awareness that he has chosen to reject her. He imagines his wife's eyelids/glister and burgeon
the fleshed hyacinth

what it is like to gather holly in the rain
'gleamed like bottle glass'
'a black-letter bush, a glittering shield-wall, cutting as holly and ice'