“Our moon was small and far…brilliant on the Pequod’s mast across Atlantic and Pacific waters” (Heaney, 45).
Seamus Heaney’s titular poem from Field Work is a love story in four parts. In each part, Heaney cleverly combines his love of nature with love for an unidentified woman. As with a few of the other poems in Heaney’s collection, it took me a few readings to catch the meaning. One of the collections I easily picked up on was in the last line of the second part of the poem, when Heaney mentions the “Pequod’s mast across Atlantic and Pacific waters” (Heaney, 45). The Pequod is a reference to the whale ship commanded by Ahab in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. The woman in the poems is unidentified, as is the landscape. However, Heaney uses vivid details to evoke the image of his native Wicklow countryside. At first, I assumed that the woman and the countryside could be one and the same, but with each reading I quickly realized that they were different entities. A few of the verbs were interesting choices by Heaney, such as “vaccination” and “ring-wormed”. Heaney is obviously looking to evoke a particular image with these words and phrases, and he does so to perfection.
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