Seamus Heaney’s Poem ‘North’ and the Irish Identity
North
This poem was written by Seamus Heaney, who was an Irish poet, playwright, and translator. It belongs to a collection of 43 poems, in which he deals with the troubles in Northern Ireland, looking frequently to the past for images and symbols relevant to the violence and political unrest of the time. It is also a reflection on Irish identity in 1975. What is to be Irish and what is to be an Irish poet among the pressing forces of three powerful northern strains: the North as a general emblem of hardship, the Atlantic North of the hybridization of Celts, Anglo-Saxons, and Viking, and the North of Ireland, with its conflicting political strife.
The poem tells us about the homecoming of the narrator to an ancestral site of his identity, of his native Northern Ireland. Here he is going to face his own identity as a Northern Irishman and as a poet, assuming all the history epitomized by the Viking invaders in this case in his own personality, first as a man and then as a poet. The immensity of the North Atlantic ocean with the prospect further north of Iceland is not very promising (unmagical), but still it can be of some profit for the identity of the poet. The story deals with the theme of the criticism to Ireland and the fabulous raiders. But also, with Heaney’s personal commitment as a human being and as a northern poet.
Facing the structure, we can see how the text is divided into three parts: the first one is from “I returned to a long strand…” to “…of Greenland, and suddenly”, where the narrative voice presents us the land and his thoughts in a sense of disillusion. The second one, begins in the verse nine, from “those fabulous raiders…” to “…memory incubating the spilled blood” where they talk about the wars that happened in the époque of Vikings, the traditional ship tombs and revenge. And the third part formed from “It said, Lie down…” until the end of the text, where we can see how the ancestral voice of the past addresses the poet and counsels him about how to integrate the past in his present identity. The voice of the long ship now tells the person and poet Seamus Heaney not to delude himself into believing he is a southern poet with plenty of sunlight, warmth, and colorfulness, but to compose poetry in the dark atmosphere of the North, rather looking inside himself, taking advantage of the things that the austere North can offer you.