18 pages • 36 minutes read
North
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Themes
The Living Past
The past, In Heaney’s “North,” is represented through physical objects rather than academic study or an individual’s memory. The poem begins with the speaker looking out to the “Atlantic thundering” (Line 4), an image that begins their reverie about the history of the land they stand on. Likewise, most of the poem consists of the speaker’s exploration of physical embodiments of the past. These embodiments, most significantly, are the “fabulous raiders” (Line 9), the “long swords” (Line 12), and the “longship” (Line 20).
Despite their age-old provenance, all of these objects constitute part of the present-day landscape and are represented as active participants in the present. The raiders are “lying in Orkney and Dublin” (Line 10), making them grammatically indistinguishable from any living individual. The swords are still in the process of “rusting” (Line 12) rather than rusted, actively oxidizing while adding a “glinting” to the “thawed streams” (Lines 15-16). Similarly, the longship speaks not only through the poet-speaker, but is actually depicted as having a “swimming tongue” (Line 20) of its own. By using the gerund—a verb form that implies continuous ongoing motion—to describe these objects’ actions, the poet-speaker demonstrates how they live on through to the present.
The past and its artifacts are intimately tied to the speaker’s sense of place. As discussed in the Poem Analysis section, the objects that have been passed down through time literally become part of the land and provide the land with its shape. This effect also holds true for the land’s inhabitants, who are able to communicate with and give voice to these objects. Even the speaker has a past that continues to influence the present in this active way: The poem opens by telling the reader that the speaker “returned” to the place that occasioned the poem (Line 1). Their past experience has influenced their coming and the entire poem.
Migration and the Postcolonial
Heaney’s exploration of how the past expresses itself in the present focuses on how the past lives of migrants, raiders, and settlers continue to shape the world. The poem highlights this theme of human migration through a series of close observations of artifacts that testify to the draw of migration and the effects that it has on subsequent generations.
Postcolonialism, the academic discipline that looks at the cultural legacy of colonial and imperial powers, was not fully established when Heaney wrote “North,” but the poem contains ideas sympathetic with the field. In particular, the way the poem frames Ireland as shaped by “raiders” and their ships (Line 9), “geography and trade” (Line 23), and the “behind-backs / of the althing” (Lines 25-26), demonstrates how outside political and economic forces shaped contemporary Ireland even before the Anglo-Norman invasion.
This interpretation is complicated by the speaker’s enthusiastic engagement with these external historic forces. However, this engagement differentiates between historic modes of settling (as represented by the raiders), and contemporary colonial practice. The historical migrants of Heaney’s poem were forced to rely on and contribute to the beauty and diversity of the land they settled (see the Poem Analysis section for more on the idea of migrants beautifying the land). The speaker’s engagement with these historical Nordic artifacts is important because they have, over time, become integrated with Irish culture. Contribution and integration run contrary to the exploitative colonial mission, which often separates the colonists from the people of the colonies and ensures the flow of resources to the colonist’s home country.
The Work of the Poet
The poet’s work is a major theme in many of Heaney’s poems, including “North.” Heaney is particularly interested in the way poetic composition continues cultural history. In this poem, the connection is straightforward: The longship, an artifact of Ireland’s past, directly instructs the poet-speaker to be immersed in the accumulated language of centuries (“Lie down / in the word-hoard” (Lines 29-30)) and “Compose in darkness” (Line 33).
The last three stanzas of “North” are a kind of aesthetic theory, with instructions such as “burrow / the coil and gleam / of your furrowed brain” and “trust the feel of what nubbed treasure / your hands have known” (Lines 30-32, 39-40) offering a clear poetic ideal rooted in the essential nature of physical sensation, texture, and touch. Similarly, the instruction to “Compose in darkness” (Line 33) implies that poetry should be oral and that it should not be about what one sees. The use of the antiquated and multivalent term “word-hoard” (Lines 29-30) instead of the purely Latinate “vocabulary” implies an older, pre-literate form of poetry, in which a poet would use the piled up treasure hoard of language created from waves of migrants to the isles implies an oral composition.
These stanzas are also a poetic call to arms. Though the act of poetic composition is inherently less active than the attacks of the “fabulous raiders” (Line 9), the longship asks the poet-speaker to perform the same action of “lying” (Line 10). By asking the poet-speaker to “Lie down / in the word-hoard” (Lines 29-30) the longship makes an implicit connection between poet and raider, suggesting that poetry has an equally important role.
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By Seamus Heaney
