In his poem ëOystersí from Field Work (1979), Heaney has associated
the sea with poetic light and the imagination. As Neil Corcoran notes,
ë[i]t is the light ìlike poetryî, leaning in temptingly, invitingly, a
poetry of the sea, not the land, transcending the diminishments of
human history: poetry as alternative, as delight and consolation, as the
free play of imagination.í^37 Sea images can offer escape, freedom,
transformation or a way out from the gravities on land.
However, in ëOceanís Love To Irelandí (1975), the sea is the
place from which the colonizers come. As Darcy OíBrien indicates,
reading Wintering Out and North it is difficult to imagine Heaney
taking Joyceís advice and diving into uncharted waters since his place
is on land ëas the uncertain narrator of his earth-nurtured
preoccupations, experiences, delvingsí.^38 This would be true of the
ëuncertain narratorí in North. But in Station Island, written a decade
later, Heaney reinscribes the myth of Sweeney the birdman as he takes
flight from the ground of the North and lives in the trees. As Robert
Tracy explains in his essay ëInto An Irish Free State: Heaney,
Sweeney and Clearing Awayí (1995):
Sweeney interferes with St. Ronan, and the Saint curses him: in the midst of
battle Sweeney will become terrified and flee, will become a kind of birdman
living in the trees, moving restlessly all over Ireland, cold, hungry, and exiled
from the comforting and familiar. But, though the Saint does not say so, song
goes with birdhood. Sweeney becomes a poet, eloquently celebrating his own
exile and unease.^39Tracy notices how the figure of Sweeney from Heaneyís translation of
the Middle Irish sequence Buile Suibhne (The Madness, or Frenzy of
Sweeney), signals a major change in his work. The sequence took ten
years for Heaney to translate and was taken up shortly after his move
South to the Irish Republic in 1972. Eventually published in 1983 as
Sweeney Astray, the sequence introduces Heaneyís later poetic themes
37 Neil Corcoran, Seamus Heaney (London: Faber, 1996), p.131.
38 Darcy OíBrien, ëPiety and Modernism: Seamus Heaneyís Station Islandí,
James Joyce Quarterly, Vol.26 (Fall, 1988ñ9), p.60.
39 Robert Tracy, ëInto An Irish Free State: Heaney, Sweeney and Clearing Awayí,
Michael Kenneally, Contemporary Irish Literature, Studies in Contemporary
Irish Literature 2, Irish Literary Studies 43 (Bucks: Gerrards Cross, 1995),
pp.238ñ62, p.239.