Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney’s Blackberry-Picking describes the speaker’s pastoral memories of blackberry-picking, a yearly ritual beginning in the late August. Using a slew of rhetorical devices such as allusion and imagery, Heaney captures the innocence of the speaker’s past self, and innovatively mirror the process of growing up through the duality of two voices throughout the poem. A song of innocence and experience, Heaney presents a third-person perspective on the blossoming of blackberries, before…

Creon’s belief in civic values The Burial at Thebes, by Seamus Heaney, tells the story of a defiant woman named Antigone, and a pompous king. Antigone has been sentenced to death by the king, Creon. Throughout the book Creon shows the characteristics of Hubris, by being arrogant, attempting to show authority to his family, and over exerting his power.Multiple of Creon’s family members die by exile or by suicide. This is due to the king’s Hubris and effort to prove to the people that no one is…

Values of Women Can you imagine being a woman in a society that was not valued for the tasks she completed or her role in society? Imagine men in society being looked as more valued individuals. In the translation of the epic poem Beowulf, by Seamus Heaney, women are objectified by men and only valued if they were good servants to men during the Anglo-Saxon time period, this lifestyle shows the cultural norms of valuing servitude, obedience, and acquiescence. Women are looked at as inferior to…

Frances Gu 09.05.14 Stylistic uses of structure and language in “Act of Union” by Seamus Heaney to enhance a metaphorical relationship between Ireland and England A highly stylized element of Seamus Heaney’s poems is to never explicitly discuss political issues, but rather to allude to the past to understand the present. As a native from Northern Ireland, politics did, however, affect Heaney’s life inexorably as it did with many in the political and sectarian strife between Irish nationalists…

positive or a negative decision. On these hard situations, people believe fate is in their hands. Fate is a predetermined event and it is often caused by a supernatural force. While others don’t believe that. In the poem, “Beowulf” translated by Seamus Heaney, the concept of fate is introduced and fate follows the protagonist throughout the poem. Beowulf was written by an anonymous author between eighth and eleventh century. The indication of fate existed even back then. The poem starts out with…

‘Follower’ by Seamus Heaney is a poem that pulls on your emotions and that of many people can relate to. It is about a boy who has idolized his father his whole life, wanting to be just like him, but as he grows up he realizes that his father may not be as he thought he was and changes directions to where his life was heading. Throughout his life he was always following and looking up to his father but the roles switched, where he was once following his father, his father is now following him.…

INTRODUCTO Good morning all. My name is Joseph Brough, and I am here to explain how Seamus Heaney compresses his life experiences into two of his poems, “Death of a Naturalist” and “Blackberry-Picking”. Heaney’s use of language techniques such as meter, diction and consonance is fine-tuned in these poems to construct a compressed and intense representation of childhood joy, growing up, and the subsequent loss of innocence. Heaney considers these factors to be central to the experience of youth…

In tracing how William Butler Yeats influenced Seamus Heaney, it is significant to note similarities in their backgrounds. Yeats was intensely mindful of his role as a national poet/politician representing all Irish. Heaney also evolved into a definitive poet for the entire island. Both transitioned from being primarily Irish poets to world poets as evidenced by their winning of individual Nobel prizes seventy years apart. Like Yeats, Heaney was recognized globally, as likely to lecture at…

Many people would like to be known for achieving something great in their lives. Many others believe that being true to others are the most valued. Some think that their kinship is what really matters. Many characters in the story Beowulf by Seamus Heaney emphasize qualities of being “great” in their time of being: the importance of material wealth, loyalty, and kinship. Material wealth is obviously not the most important thing in life to us, but in the time of the Anglo-saxons material…

not fulfilled, almost instinctively one still keeps hoping. Hope is natural because no matter how many times one is let down, there is always a trickle of hope left in them. These ideas are corroborated from “Blackberry Picking”, by Seamus Heaney. In this text, Heaney presents a point that albeit the human soul is greedy, in its darkest of time, it too strives for hope. The character in the poem shares their experience with picking blackberries and about how it takes careful procedure to…