Bone Dreams by Seamus Heaney – An Analysis
Bone Dreams is an obscure and difficult poem to understand. In all my
searching on the internet, I found very little to help me in my
analysis of this poem and so the ideas are basically my own. I might
be wide of the mark, but for anybody struggling to understand this
poem, it might at least give you some ideas of your own. I make no
apology for asking questions or for sounding vague or even muddled in
places. I hope that this essay is of help to somebody, somewhere.
The poem begins in a thoughtful mood; the voice is relaxed, “White
bone found/on the grazing” suggesting that the speaker is walking in
the countryside when he discovers a piece of bone in the grass. He
uses tactile imagery to describe his find, the bone is “rough, porous”
and has “the language of touch”. This image would be powerful if not
for the mildness of the language, which conveys a musing quality in
its passivity, for example, “found” and “grazing” - these words have
nothing of a hurry about them and suggest a peacefulness of mind in
the opening stanzas.
He continues to describe the piece of bone, making comparisons with a
“ship-burial” and notes the impressions in the grass as “yellowing,
ribbed”. The word “ribbed” is suggestive, with its subject matter of
bone, to a rib-cage.
The bone takes on a significance which is greater than its intrinsic
worth – which is nothing – because the speaker equates it with
treasure; it is, “flint-find”, a “nugget of chalk”, the word nugget
being quite often associated with gold, and therefore he says it has a
value in itself. “Flint” suggests history, a link to the stone-age and
the find is, in fact, described as being, “as dead as stone”. So here
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... little points were the eyes”, as if to
say that he had never really seen anything. Furthermore, if he is
“identifying” with the English (if he is the mole) then this poem
could be about trying to see through the eyes of the invader and
coming to a new understanding through this identification process.
The closing lines are highly optimistic, as if the sun has come out
from being behind a very large, black cloud; “I touched small distant
Pennines, /a pelt of grass and grain/running south”.
The final section as a whole is highly suggestive of discovery or of
realisation, of altered perception and of forgiveness for past sins.
The poem begins in Ireland with a piece of yellowing bone, but ends in
England with a dead mole. The bone found on Irish grass has taken him
through a series of thoughts and memories. At the end he seems altered
by the experience.
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