who was driven insane by a curse that was placed
on him by a bishop he had attacked. In the
section of the story that Snodgrass relates,
Suibhne has left society and is living in a tree.
He gradually comes to his senses when a noble,
Loingseachan, tells him of the deaths of his
mother, his sister, his daughter, and his son,
and he drops out of the tree, only to be arrested.
In the midst of this discussion, he refers to an
only daughter as being a needle of the heart,
which can imply both the pain of a needle punc-
ture and the sense of direction given by a com-
pass needle.
Section 1
Snodgrass begins the poem by comparing his
feelings for his daughter to those felt by a farmer
toward his field that is covered by winter snow.
His daughter was born in the winter, and, like a
field in winter, she represented pure, unsullied
potential. As Snodgrass depicts the situation, the
daughter’s life, like the coming summer for the
farmer’s fields, will be full of work and suffering
before there is any rest to be had.
The marriage that the child is born into is
not portrayed as a happy one. The poet describes
himself as being torn by love and as silenced by
his fears. Although the birth of the child is a
happy occasion, it is also one that is fraught
with uncertainty.
Section 2
The poem’s second section takes place when the
child is three. The time of year is also moved
forward, from the dead of winter to April, a
pattern that the poem follows throughout.
The central image of this section is a garden
that the father is helping his child plant. The
perimeter of the garden is defined by strings,
which are said, a little jokingly, to pose a defense
against animals that might crawl or tunnel into
it. The father advises his daughter to watch over
it, to water the seeds, and to keep her garden free
of weeds. In the end, he admits that she will be
responsible for looking after her garden because
he will not be living at that house any more in a
few months, when the plants come up.Section 3
Section 3 is about the tension in the speaker’s
household that precedes the family’s breakup.
Snodgrass draws a comparison between the
unhappy household and the political situation
known as the cold war. The main similarity pre-
sented here is that the soldiers of the cold war were
kept in a constant state of anxiety, prepared to
fight but always kept waiting for actual combat to
break out, just as the people in a bad marriage
might spend much of their time wondering when
all of the pent-up hostility might turn into actual
fighting.
The first image in this section, in the first
stanza, is that of a child walking along the street
with two parents and being lifted up over a puddle,
with each parent taking one hand. The child is not
the daughter that Snodgrass talks about through-
out most of the poem but a boy, mentioned with
the masculine pronoun. In this stanza, all three
members of the family are presented as one homo-
genous unit, working together smoothly, but once
the child is swung over the puddle they separate
from each other.
At the end of this section, the speaker of the
poem once again addresses his daughter. He
recalls a time when, playing with her, he pulled
too hard on her arm and dislocated her wrist.
Writing from a distance, as someone who now
lives apart from her, he wishes that some twist of
fate, as in a Chinese play, would tell the girl that
he was wholly responsible for her, that he was as
much her mother as her father.MEDIA
ADAPTATIONS Snodgrass reads from ‘‘Heart’s Needle’’ on
Nine Pulitzer Prize Poets Read Their Own
Poems, an LP recording by the Library of
Congress Recordings Laboratory that was
released in 1963 as part of itsTwentieth Cen-
tury Poetry in Englishseries.
As read by the author, sections 7 and 9 of
this poem are available on a cassette tape
titledCalling from the Woods’ Edge, released
in 1986 by Watershed Tapes.Heart’s Needle