Seamus Heaney's Poetic Struggle with the Past Anonymous 11th Grade

In his critically acclaimed collection North, contemporary Irish poet Seamus Heaney reveals a very personal side of himself and of his identity as a writer. Although each individual poem explores its own storyline and employs its own metaphors, one common thread seems to unravel throughout the collection: the past, particularly that of Ireland. And Heaney’s angst-ridden endeavor to recount this past, though perpetuated throughout the entire book, is especially lucid in the relationship between the two back-to-back poems “North” and “Trial Pieces.” Viewing these pieces as one consecutive development of theme rather than as two separate entities, Heaney’s readers are better able to grasp a fundamental constant in both his work and himself: a sense of obligation to preserve the past and a conflicting fear of misrepresenting or exploiting it.

As the collection’s namesake, the poem “North” takes on the responsibility of establishing author’s purpose and encompassing the general mood of the book, which it accomplishes pretty successfully. The poem opens with the words, “I returned…,” immediately setting a precedent of memory and a desire to go back. Heaney proceeds to describe the present condition of his setting as “secular” and “...