because such a statement ëseemed unduly loaded with political
promiseí. Heaney argues that to go ëabove the brimí or beyond the
conventional bounds of representation provides a ëredress of poetryí.
He also looks to a ëbi-focalí perspective, where one is ëin two mindsí
so as to ëreconcile two orders of knowledgeí.^49
These intentions are hinted at in the poem ëTerminusí from The
Haw Lantern (1987) where Heaney imagines himself as a pair of
human scales, a human spirit-level or balancer:
Two buckets were easier carried than one.
I grew up in between.My left hand placed the standard iron weight.
My right tilted a last grain in the balance.^50The image here is comparable with the scales of justice whereby the
poet becomes a cultural judge who weighs up extremes. The position
of cultural judge is not an easy one and the yoke of it falls heavily
upon the shoulders of the poetic speaker, who finds that two buckets
are easier to carry than one since they enable him to keep his balance.
Considering this image, it is no wonder that Heaneyís moderate
ëlessons in verseí create an amount of resentment from the critic John
Redmond who names the poet ëscribe, seer and teacherí, and remains
suspicious of Heaneyís ëgood adviceí and lecturing techniques.^51 But
unlike the good intentions of Heaneyís critical essays, his poetry
provides no such easy advice; instead, the poems shift uneasily on
uncomfortable ground.
Heaney/Sweeneyís acts of deterritorialization can be read in
terms of cultural decolonization as he questions the geographic,
historic, ideological and linguistic spaces occupied by himself, his
audience and the occupants of the North. At the end of ëStation Islandí
when the poet takes the hand of Joyce ë[l]ike a convalescentí, ë[i]t was
as if I had stepped free into space/ alone with nothing that I had not
49 Ibid., pp.186ñ203.
50 Heaney, ëTerminusí, The Haw Lantern (London: Faber, 1987), pp.4ñ5.
51 John Redmond, ëA lesson in verseí, Saturday Review of The Guardian,
Saturday September 19th 1998, p.9.