the population have been cast into a minority status and treated as an
underclass. What is interesting in Longleyís comment is when she
notices how ëThe Other Sideí attempts to span two languages to create
a third.
For example, there is the ëtongue of chosen peopleí which
represents the Protestant farmer and we hear his voice within the
poem narrated by the Catholic: ëYour side of the house, I believe,/
hardly rule by the book at all.í Whereas the Catholic views the
Protestant as having a ëbrainí like ëa whitewashed kitchen/ hung with
texts, swept tidy/ as the body oí the kirk.í^69 When the Protestant
farmer visits ëafter the litanyí, he hears ëthe rosaryí ëdragging/
mournfully on in the kitchení of his Catholic neighbours. On the one
hand, both views are presented and the narrator recognizes the
differences between neighbours but holds them together within the
space of the poem which forges a double perspective, a third space or
passage in between opposing perspectives which is desired by Heaney
the middle man in Oxford. On the other hand, the poem outlines the
rifts between each community, the suspicion and fascination with
which each side views the other, and the symbolic irreconcilable of
two different consciousnesses or cultures. Whereas ëMaking Strangeí
introduces a complete foreigner or alien to the Northern territory, ëThe
Other Sideí represents different ethnicities living as neighbours within
the same territory. In neither poem is there discovered an easy third
space or point of balance in-between contesting identities, although
both poems uneasily attempt to transgress the border between them. If
the poems were to be measured by Heaney as the human scales in
ëTerminusí, the bubble in the spirit-level would find no resting point
of balance.
69 Heaney, Wintering Out, p.35.