Personal Helicon Poem by Seamus Heaney

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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... ... middle of paper ... ... 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.

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