Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Seamus Heaney-Field Work
In this poem there are many references to the outside world. Heaney liked to incorporate his poems with scenes from nature. My favorite lines are, "Where the sally tree went pale in every breeze,/where the perfect eye of the nesting blackbird watched,/where one fern was always green/I was standing watching you(page 44)." This part of the poem made me think that it could potentially be on the subject of love. Heaney and the woman may have both been outside in nature and he always found himself staring at her. Wherever they were, there was a train that separated the two of them from one another. So, I think maybe the woman did not she was being watched by Heaney. I had a hard time interpreting the second and third parts of the poem. But I was starting to think that when he was correlating a coin with the moon, he may have been talking about the size. Sometimes if you close one eye and place your thumb to the moon, you can cover it. It looks as though its the size of a quarter. If its a love poem, then its beautiful in a way beyond my understanding.
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This is a good point with the train that always comes between the two of them. As all the Heaney’s poems, also Field Work is a mysterious one. When he was writing the poem, he was already married; however, I could not find any of his autobiographies that would mention he had a farm with his wife. Because he grew up on a farm, maybe he was recalling something from his childhood. One source said, Heaney’s family moved out from the farm when Haeney was 12 years old. At this age, he could not feel anything that would make him write a love poem. I thought the woman he is talking about in the poem might be his mother from the time he still lived at a farm, but who knows who the mysterious woman was.
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