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7.3
/10
(47
votes)
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I
To-night, a first movement, a pulse,
As if the rain in bogland gathered head
To slip and flood: a bog-burst,
A gash breaking open the ferny bed.
Your back is a firm line of eastern coast
And arms and legs are thrown
Beyond your gradual hills. I caress
The heaving province where our past has grown.
I am the tall kingdom over your shoulder
That you would neither cajole nor ignore.
Conquest is a lie. I grow older
Conceding your half-independant shore
Within whose borders now my legacy
Culminates inexorably.
II
And I am still imperially
Male, leaving you with pain,
The rending process in the colony,
The battering ram, the boom burst from within.
The act sprouted an obsinate fifth column
Whose stance is growing unilateral.
His heart beneath your heart is a wardrum
Mustering force. His parasitical
And ignmorant little fists already
Beat at your borders and I know they're cocked
At me across the water. No treaty
I foresee will salve completely your tracked
And stretchmarked body, the big pain
That leaves you raw, like opened ground, again
Seamus Heaney
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Read poems about / on: pain, rain, water, heart, night
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Comments about this poem (Act of Union
by
Seamus Heaney
) |
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comments about this poem (Act of Union by
Seamus Heaney
)
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Bloog Mandrake
(3/6/2009 10:57:00 PM) |
It's pretty clear the tarnation, Clark, is the birth of a son.
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Clark Shattuck
(1/20/2009 11:34:00 PM) |
Yeah, O.K., what the tarnation is he talking about? This obscuring of meaning for effect has become old, years ago. Nobody knows what the hell anyone is talking about, really. (O.K., with some wonderful exceptions)
Signed,
Uninspired
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Johnny Muir
(6/17/2008 7:47:00 AM) |
Hi, I work for the BBC in Belfast and am working on a documentary to mark Seamus Heaney's 70th birthday. His work is studied (and written about in exams) by people all over the world and I am trying to find out what impact it has them. This poem is written about his relationship with his wife - yet it clearly has a resonance for a lot of people. I would love to hear anyone's comments on what Heaney's poetry means to them. Tell me about individual poems that have made an impact on you and why!
Cheers,
johnny.muir@bbc.co.uk
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Paul Butters
(3/1/2008 8:39:00 AM) |
Dinner first I trust. Raw stuff.
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Seamus Heaney
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