Personal Helicon Poem by Seamus Heaney

In his poem Personal Helicon Heaney writes: I rhyme/ To see myself,

to set the darkness echoing. To what extent and in what ways has your

readings of his poems led you both to understand and to agree with

what he means?

Seamus heaney was one is nine children, born in 1939 in Northern

Ireland. Heaney and his family were part of the Catholic minority, at

the time, and as we can see from his poems, he came from a poor, lower

class family of farmers and the pride and respect he had for his

parents is clearly echoed in his poems. However, later in life Heaney

moved south so that he could write his poems more openly some of which

showed his political preferences. This brought mounting pressure to

his conscience and as a well-known poet he felt he had to say

something, which he did using his poems. This quote comes from the

poem 'Personal Helicon' in which Heaney remembers himself as an

inquisitive boy, fascinated by wells, gradually exploring the world

around him.

Helicon is a mountain in Greece where nine muses are thought to have

lived; they were daughters of Zeus an sources of inspiration. In this

poem, 'Personal Helicon', Heaney talks about his own inspiration,

"wells and old pumps with buckets and windlasses". Heaney was an

inquisitive boy, alive and open to the world, he spent a lot of time

outside and was interested in how things work. From the opening lines

of this poem, we can see that Heaney was not fascinated by cars or

toys like most children, he was interested in wells, the sounds and

smells of simple things like "waterweeds, fungus and dank moss." he

was attracted to darkness and danger:

"[he] loved the dark drop

[he] savoured the rich crash when a bucket

Plummeted down at the end of a...

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Here, Heaney examines the negatives of life and connects himself to a

"wood-kerne" because even though he escaped the massacre in Northern

Ireland, he still sees himself as some sort of fighter, a poetic

fighter with a pen rather than a gun. This is a self-critical poem, in

which Heaney blame himself for not doing all he can and making a fuss

about himself,

"Blowing up these sparks

For their meagre heat, have missed

The once-in-a-lifetime portent."

I feel that Heaney writes his poems to explore the depths of his

personality of which he was not aware before, such as the fact that he

"is the artful voyeur", he would "connive" in outrageous acts and that

he "would cast the stones of silence" on many acts and by writing

self-critical poems like 'Punishment' and 'Exposure' he tells us that

one might not always discover pleasant things about oneself.