...Seamus Heaney Seamus Justin Heaney was born in Castledawson, County Londonderry, Northern Ireland in 1939 and died in Dublin, the Republic of Ireland in 2013 at the age of 74. Seamus was born into a typical Irish farming family, and later had nine younger siblings to look after. His father, Patrick Heaney came from a farming family as well, and his mother Margaret Heaney came from At the age of 12, Seamus received a scholarship to attend the boarding school of St. Columb’s in Derry and after school he studied English at the Queens University, Belfast and graduated in 1961. He worked as a schoolteacher before becoming a collage lecturer in Oxford University and then eventually a freelance scribe in the early 70’s. In 1965, he married a fellow writer Marie Devlin and they had three children, and from 1976 onwards they lived together in Sandymount, Dublin. A lot of Seamus’s poems “tend to revolve around several common themes” and “are all interconnected”. His memories of his childhood and death are two major themes, which make an appearance in many of the poems he has written. Due to where, and in that certain time period, he grew up in, a lot of Seamus’s poems also focus on nature, farming, his homeland, war, family and religion. There are many critics that suggest, Heaney’s poems on the Northern Irish troubles which he liked to write about had an “overcautious approach, aesthetically and politically, and [gravitated] instinctively towards Parnassian inoffensiveness”...
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...Contents Seamus Heaney’s Life: Biographical Life………………………………………………………………….......Page 1 Timeline of Events……………………………………………………………………Page 2 Political History (Northern Ireland – 1960/1970)…………………………………..Page 3 Seamus Heaney’s Work: Evaluation of Poetry influences…………………………………………………….Page 4 Seamus Heaney’s Poetry……………………………………………………………Page 5 Digging…………………………………………………………………………………Page 6 Analysis and Explanation of Digging…………………………………………….....Page 7 References…………………………………………………………………………....Page 8 Biological Life Childhood: Seamus Heaney was the eldest child from among the nine siblings in his family; he was born on 13th April 1939 in Mossbawn (Northern Ireland), which was their own family farmhouse. But later in 1953 (14 years later), Heaney’s family had decided to move location to Bellaghy which is just only a few miles from their farmhouse. His background consists of two different traditions which come from both his parent’s families, an Ireland from the Cattle-Herding Gaelic (Father’s family – Patrick Heaney) and the Ulster from the Industrial Revolution (Mother’s family – Margaret Kathleen Heaney). He studied at Anahorish Primary School in the local area; and as he grew older, he started to attend St. Columb’s College where he was awarded a scholarship at the age of 12. Career: Heaney who was only 18 years of age at the time when he had decided to travel to Belfast where he was given the opportunity to study English Language and Literature...
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...I’ll dig with it." Digging Seamus Justin Heaney, a contemporary Irish poet who won the Nobel Prize in 1995, is widely considered one of the main twentieth century writers. In fact, many critics considered him the most important Irish poet since W. B. Yeats. Born in a farming family in Northern Ireland, Heaney suffered many divisions in his life – personal, social and political all together. He sat an aim for himself to be like his ancestors, who protected their lands in the face of the English colonization, and become a defender of Ireland in his own way. In 1966, he wrote his famous poem Digging, which defines his mission as a poet, and placed it as an introductory to his collection Death of a Naturalist. A reader of Heaney's works will notice that the analogy of digging is running throughout all of his poems, whether it is a physical excavation or an intellectual one. This image of digging is depicted in his themes and poetic discourse to form an Irish identity that divorces itself from the English rule by combining both earthy roots and airy imagination. To begin with, there are certain features that characterize the themes in Heaney's poetry. In most of his poems, Heaney illustrates the Irish landscape and the rural life of the farmers to show the strong ties between his people and their land. Moreover, he spoke in one of his essays about the influence of the bog lands in which dead bodies were excavated. He believes, therefore, that poetry works as a preserver of history...
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...Darren Estes Professor Addington English 111 04 November 2014 Digging In Seamus Heaney’s, “The Digging” the author tells a story that emphasizes strength and family values to portray that your upbringing and family roots do not have to define your route in life. Heaney also incorporates different rhetorical devices throughout the poem to make the text more vivid. Through this use of language and text manipulation, the reader can grasp the weight of this poem for Heaney, while also identifying with his early background in life. Heaney begins the poem from the perspective of a young man, who has taken a different path in life from that of his family. The son immediately identifies himself as having a different outlook on life by emphasizing the weight of his pen “Between my finger and my thumb/The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.” (Heaney 1-2). This comparison between his pen and a gun shows how powerful he believes his pen can be in regards to the work of his father. We are then shown a scene of his father working outside of his window, which relates to overall theme of the poem and the strength needed to perform hard labor. Through this use of language Heaney shows us the power struggle for the son in this poem, the son sees strength not through the use of manual labor but by other means, while the father values physical strength. Any type of work that requires manual labor can be extremely taxing if done for long periods of time, while visibly showing on the workers...
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...For Heaney it is the small events of the past that are the windows to the present. (Growth and Experience) Seamus Heaney often makes a connection between the past and the present, to explore human growth and experience in his poetry. In poems such as Punishment, The Tollund Man, and Death of a Naturalist, Heaney draws on the past to explore contemporary conflicts such as the Irish Troubles and the maturation of humans in general. Through his use of metaphors representing the problems of the past, the reader gains an insight into the bigger picture of human nature, and what changes throughout time. Human growth and experience is a main concern in Heaney’s ‘Death of a Naturalist’. In this poem Heaney explores the transition from innocence to experience acquired with age, and how this personal growth changes the speaker’s views in life. The language used by the speaker in the first stanza such as ‘mammy’ and ‘daddy’ connotes the innocence of the child at the beginning of the poem. His selection of words also had this effect, words like “bubble” and “butterflies” that the speaker talks about also evoke happiness and pleasure associated with a young innocent child. There is also a break between the two verses of the poem and the second stanza begins with the word ‘then’. This particular word signifies the change in the child, both in age and in mentality. The line “I ducked through hedges to a coarse croaking that I had not heard before,” also suggests a change in the speaker...
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...A group of a few women born in the second decade of the century might together illustrate the diversity of the twentieth-century novelist's interests. Elizabeth Taylor (1912-1975), the author the novels The Soul of Kindness and Blaming, is a refined stylist whose swift flashes of dialogue and reflection and deft sketches of the wider background give vitality to her portrayals of well-to-do family life in commuter land. Some of her later novels are In a Summer Season (1961), and The Wedding Group (1968.) Elizabeth Taylor has humour and compassion as well as disciplined artistry, and has logically been compared with Jane Austen. So has Barbara Pym (1913-1980) who tasted fame, sadly enough, only at the end of her life (her real name was Mary Crampton). Another restrained and perceptive artist, she is a master of J f ingenuous and candid dialogue and reflection which are resonant with comic overtones. Critics I called her "modern Jane Austin. Excellent Women (1952) and A Glass of Blessings (1958) were reprinted in the late 1970s when Philip Larkin and David Cecil drew attention to the quality of her neglected work. Later novels, The Sweet Dove Died (1978) and Quartet in Autumn (1978), are no less engaging in their blend of pathos and comedy. One might well put beside these two English writers the Irish writer Mary Lavin (1912-1996), whose short stories focus on the ups and downs of family life with quiet pathos and humour. Her novels, The House in Clewes Street (1945)...
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...Roots Seamus Heaney was born in 1939 in Northern Ireland. Heaney wrote Death of a Naturalist in 1966. Death of a Naturalist included the poem “Digging”; it is the first poem of the collection. “Digging” is a free verse poem written in first person narrative. Digging contains eight stanzas containing two couplets. In Seamus Heaney’s poem “Digging” the narrator is comparing his digging to his ancestors. The theme is heritage; the narrator takes a look back at his heritage to examine his career choice. Heaney shows the theme using symbols. Using digging as a metaphor for writing, Heaney shows the connection of the narrator with his early life on the farm and the lives of his father and grandfather.In the first stanza, Heaney introduces the readers to the narrator’s pen, which the narrator is content to hold as he finds a sense of belonging and comfort. The pen is described as a weapon, “snug as a gun” (L2), this gives the impression that the pen fits naturally in his hands and symbolizes a form of protection from the criticisms about his choice of “being a writer” (Miller). The pen also symbolizes “fate” (“Pen”). Writing is his fate instead of farming like his ancestors. Even though the narrator chooses not to become a digger, he still finds a similarity between the two occupations. The narrator recognizes that his skill with a pen is compatible to his father’s skill with a spade, as he suggests his pen symbolizes a spade to which he can “dig with it” (L 31). The narrator is...
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...Read the following poems by Thomas Hardy (‘The Oxen’) and Seamus Heaney (‘Cow in Calf’) in The Faber Book of Beasts (pp.195 and 62). In no more than 600 words, compare the ways in which the two poets represent cattle. New forms of poetry, however radical they appear, almost always show traces of tradition. (Danson Brown, 2008, p.63) ‘The Oxen’ written by Thomas Hardy and ‘Cow in Calf’ by Seamus Heaney show significant differences but also share some common traditional qualities. ‘The Oxen’ is a narrative poem telling the reader a story about Christmas, and about the oxen, that according to folk tradition would kneel at midnight in Christmas Eve. It also follows the speaker’s, Hardy’s, belief of the tradition. ‘Cow in Calf’ is an Imagery poem which illustrates an image rather than telling a story. The poem represents a cow that is heavily pregnant, and the natural cycle of life. Traditional Styles of poetry, that include quatrains and rhyming lines can be seen in ‘The Oxen’, which follows an ABAB rhyming scheme. The rhyming words at the end of each alternating line create an almost song-like rhythm. Rhyming poems are easier to remember and allow the reader to connect to the poem through memory rather than just reading the words alone. The consistent rhythm of the poem can also represent the way cattle move at a slow steady pace. The absence of a rhyming pattern from Heaney’s poem not only avoids the traditional poetic forms, but enables him to use words freely to portray his...
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...For any child living on a farm, your childhood would come with many different experiences. To look back on some experiences as an adult, you see the deeper meaning on how each story impacted you. Seamus Heaney’s poems “The Barn” and “Blackberry-Picking” are about a child’s point of view of experiences living on a farm. “The Barn” is about a family’s barn on a farm and “Blackberry-Picking” is on the subject of going out to pick and eat blackberries on the farm. Even though, they are about two different experiences they share a common theme of hard realities faced in life. Through the use of imagery and tone, Heaney is able to show how fear and disappointment comes into a child’s life. “The Barn” comes from the point of view of a child in the barn on a farm. For this child, the barn was a terrifying scene. With a young imagination, you get descriptive pictures of what they felt. In line 3 the speaker describes the barn as being “musky dark”. “The floor was mouse-grey, smooth, chilly concrete. (5) After hearing those phrases, you start to picture what this barn...
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...The Poetry of Seamus Heaney BA Course. Spring 2013. Ferencz Gyozo. Student: Raquel Franco. Relation between past and present in Heaney´s poetry. KINSHIP Seamus Heaney frequently looks back to the past to try to understand or highlight the present. It shows up in his early poems as Digging where he tries to come to terms with his previous generation, with his father and his grandfather who earned a living cutting turf and cultivating the fields. Heaney feels already the need of making sense of his past, his ancestors and his present self, Between my finger and my thumb/ The squat pen rests./I´ll dig with it. This duality between present and past it also clear in others poems of his first collection Death of a Naturalist as in Follower where the poet juxtaposes the past when he followed his father´s steps trying to emulate him and the present when it is his father who stands behind him, But today/It is my father who keeps stumbling/Behind me, and will not go away. And of course past is also present in other poems of that same collection as Blackberry-Picking, in which Heaney´s uses a childhood memory to reflect about the impossibility of beautiful moments to perdure, or Mid-Term Break, in which Heaney returns to a traumatic event of his childhood, the death of his younger brother which tragically taught him about the lightness of life and the definite losses that we are exposed to. But If we can affirm that the past is an almost omnipresent element in...
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...glish literature How to Write an A* GCSE English Literature Poetry Response Copyright © 2008 www.englishteaching.co.uk + www.english-teaching.co.uk How to Write an A* GCSE English Literature Poetry Response 2 The Poetry Component of the GCSE Literature Paper The poetry task is the second question on the GCSE English Literature exam paper. It is perhaps the more demanding of the tasks on the paper, because unlike the question on the prose, in this section you are being asked to compare four poems simultaneously throughout your answer. In the exam you should spend one hour on this section of the paper. Given the greater demand of the task, your response to the poetry is worth more marks than the response to the prose. In order to perform at the highest level on this paper, it is important that you develop a nuanced and sophisticated comparative written style. However, this is achievable if you adopt a systematic approach to ordering and writing your responses. It does, however, demand considerable practice prior to the final examination. What is the Examiner looking for in a response to the Poetry? The exam is designed to test your ability to do the following things: Can you respond to the poems critically, in detail, and sensitively using textual evidence? Can Can you explore language, structure and form contribute to the meaning of texts? Can Can you compare the ways that ideas, themes and relationships are presented in the poems by...
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...American war poets * 5 References * 6 Notes * 7 External links ------------------------------------------------- World War I[edit] See also category: World War I poets In England[edit] For the first time, a substantial number of important English poets were soldiers, writing about their experiences of war. A number of them died on the battlefield, most famously Edward Thomas,Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen, and Charles Sorley. Others including Robert Graves,[4] Ivor Gurney and Siegfried Sassoon survived but were scarred by their experiences, and this was reflected in their poetry. Robert H. Ross[5] characterised the English "war poets" as a subgroup of the Georgian Poetry writers. Many poems by British war poets were published in newspapers and then collected into anthologies. Several of these early anthologies were published during the war and were very popular, though the tone of the poetry changed as the war progressed. One of the wartime anthologies was The Muse in Arms, published in 1917. Several anthologies were also published in the years after the war had ended. In November 1985, a slate memorial was unveiled in Poet's Corner commemorating 16 poets of the Great War: Richard Aldington, Laurence Binyon, Edmund Blunden, Rupert Brooke, Wilfrid Gibson, Robert Graves, Julian Grenfell, Ivor Gurney, David Jones, Robert Nichols, Wilfred Owen, Herbert Read, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon,...
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...Heaney was born on 13 April 1939 into a family of nine children at the family farmhouse called Mossbawn, between Castledawson and Toomebridge in Northern Ireland. Heaney initially attended Anahorish Primary School and when he was twelve-years-old, he won a scholarship to St. Columb's College, a Catholic boarding school situated in Derry. In 1957, Heaney travelled to Belfast to study English Language and Literature at the Queen's University of Belfast. During his time in Belfast he found a copy of Ted Hughes' Lupercal, which spurred him to write poetry. Heaney's work often deals with the local surroundings: that is, his surroundings in Ireland, particularly in Northern Ireland, where he was born. Allusions to sectarian difference, widespread in Northern Ireland, can be found in his poems, but these are never predominant or strident. His poetry is not often overtly political or militant, and is far more concerned with profound observations of the small details of the everyday, far beyond contingent political concerns. Some of his work is concerned with the lessons of history, and indeed prehistory and the very ancient. Other works concern his personal family history, focusing on characters in his family and as he has acknowledged, these poems can be read as elegies for those family members. Liz Lochhead (born December 26, 1947) is a Scottish poet and dramatist, originally from Newarthill in North Lanarkshire. After attending Glasgow School of Art, she lectured in fine art for...
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...The Beggar Woman by William King | The Poet: William King (1663-1712)Little is known about William King except that he was educated at Christ Church College Cambridge, and made a living as a lawyer and judge while writing occasional satires and comic verse, most of which were published anonymously. | The Beggar Woman is like a story, it suggests that it should be read to people. This is again because it is aimed at lower class and uneducated people who would have to have someone read it to them rather than reading it for themselves. It is written in the tradition of the street or broadside ballads, printed stories in verse that were sold cheaply and passed around for pleasure, often dealing with popular scandals and murder stories. In a time before the popular press and television chat shows, these ballads satisfied a need for entertaining stories, a tradition that has deep roots in oral traditions of storytelling and wandering minstrels.At the beginning of this poem, there is a description of a gentleman out hunting, which is an upper class activity, as they are the only people who could afford to take part in such an expensive activity, also by the fact he is described as a 'Gentleman' suggests he belongs to the upper class or 'Gentry'. The 'Gentleman gets separated from his group and spots the 'Beggar Woman'. He then propositions her for sex. She obliges and they wander off into the nearby wood. She is described as 'game', because really to the man that is all she is...
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...Further copies of this publication may be downloaded from www.ccea.org.uk Specimen Papers 1 2 ADVANCED SUBSIDIARY (AS) General Certificate of Education 2009 English Literature Assessment Unit AS 2 assessing The Study of Poetry Written after 1800 and the Study of Prose 1800-1945 SPECIMEN PAPER TIME 2 hours INSTRUCTIONS TO CANDIDATES Write your Centre number and Candidate Number on the Answer Booklet provided. Answer two questions. Answer one question from Section A and one question from Section B. Section A is open book. INFORMATION FOR CANDIDATES The total mark for this paper is 120. All questions carry equal marks, ie 60 marks for each question. Quality of written communication will be assessed in all questions. 3 Section A: The Study of Poetry Written after 1800 Answer one question on your chosen pairing of poets. Heaney: Opened Ground Montague: New Selected Poems 1 John Montague and Seamus Heaney both write about the Irish past. Compare and contrast the two poets’ treatment of the Irish past in two poems you have studied. Hopkins: Selected Poems Dickinson: A Choice of Emily Dickinson’s Verse 2 Gerard Manley Hopkins and Emily Dickinson both express intense anguish in their poetry. Compare and contrast how both poets express intense anguish in two poems you have studied. Duffy: Selected Poems Lochhead: The Colour of Black and White 3...
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