"I ate the day deliberately, that it's tang might quicken me into verb, pure verb."
The first time I read this poem it was very hard to understand, but after going over it in class I really feel like I am able to understand what the poem is saying. Like many other poets Seamus Heaney uses word, that many readers can not understand, when writing his poems. In oysters he referenced the stars and different constellations. In doing so he is talking about how while eating the oysters it gives him this sort of heavenly feeling. I also thought that it was interesting that eating an oyster can stir up so many emotions. First he really enjoys the oysters, and then he gets into the mind set of feeling bad for ripping them out of their home, and then he hopes that the taste of the oysters will just let him not think about it and just doing it.
The quote above I thought was interesting because it talks about two very contradictory things: thinking and doing. There are many times throughout our lives where we wish that we did not contemplate things so much and just do it. And so I wonder why Seamus Heaney felt such a strong connecting with the oysters and had difficulty enjoying them? And are the oysters a metaphor for something else in his life that he is over thinking and having trouble putting these thought into actions?
Katelyn, I think you make some good points here! You know, I'm not sure the oysters are necessarily a longer metaphor, but I do think we can point to other places in Heaney's environs that make him question this line between thinking and doing: for instance, we learned about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and I'm sure he wonders where he should be, if he should be doing more, what he can be doing. You know?
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