Seamus Heaney Response

The two poems we read in class, “Oysters” and “The Guttural Muse” were both very descriptive poems. I liked how the poem “Oysters had such strong verbs like, “ripped and shucked and scattered” (Heaney 3), “clacked”, “disgorge” (Heaney 3). All the verbs gave a strong emotional feel to the poem as I could sense the verbs and I could sense myself eating an oyster. In the same way, “The Guttural Muse” had a very strong feel to it. I could imagine all the phrases like “muddied night airs””young crowd leave the discotheque” (Heaney 20). Both of them gave such strong imagery as I could imagine all the poems in my head. As in the poem “Oysters” Heaney expresses how he’s angry about just thinking instead of taking any action, but in “The Guttural Muse” he’s still thinking back and reflecting on his youth as he looks at the young people coming from the discotheque, but unlike in “Oysters” (where if he tried he could take action like not eat the oysters) in “The Guttural Muse” even if Heaney wants to do something he can’t because his youth is already in the past and he can’t turn back.

Specifically for the poem “Oysters” the structure of the poem was very interesting to me. The first stanza is all about the pleasant taste in his mouth when eating the oyster, then the second stanza becomes serious and more of a dark tone of how the oysters are “ripped” (Heaney 3) from their environment, then the third stanza goes back to this pleasant feeling of eating oysters in a social situation with friends. The structure of the poem itself shows the conflicting emotion of Heaney as he likes the taste of oysters and enjoys eating them, but when he thinks about how they’re stripped away from their environment he gets angry which is just like the structure of the poem as the emotions of each stanza alternates back and forth.