seamus heaney 'kinship'

This is the vowel of the earth
dreaming its root
in flowers and snow.

(s. heaney, north)

"The impersonal claims of mythology are exposed to the pressures of private emotion which he sets out to present and to penetrate in their most irreducible aspects. He shows the relation between theory and experience, between the idea that he has preconceived, that is by its nature general and inclusive, and the tangle of feelings which, in their immediacy and closeness, substantially constitute human experience. He enters imaginatively into his mythic world and looks around, moves about in it, receiving signals from its denizens; he is inside events so that he is not presenting them objectively; he notes them; he is open to contradictory feelings, even more acutely unsure of himself and of what goes on around him." (E. Andrews, The Poetry of Seamus Heaney, 91)

"Kinned by hieroglyphic
peat on a spreadfield
to the strangled victim,
the love-nest in the bracken,

I step through origins..." ('Kinship')

"The writing enacts the strain of coming to terms with the past." (e.a., 92)

"Part IV, returning to a generalizing, reflective mood, thus begins with the assertion that he has discovered a centre that holds and spreads. This is the literal bog, it is also the bog as his central poetic symbol, holding within its spread of meaning the paradox of life itself ('sump and seedbed... and a melting grave'), all that has gone to make the poet what he is":

"I grew out of all this
like a weeping willow
inclined to
the appetites of gravity." (sh, 'Kinship')