Terminus

“Terminus” is a short lyric poem that shares Seamus Heaney’s sensations and childhood memories of growing up in rural County Derry in Northern Ireland during the Second World War. The theme of boundaries in the poem also references the Troubles in Northern Ireland (see Contextual Analysis), which spanned most of his adolescence and adult life. The poem’s title evokes the Roman god Terminus: the god who protects boundaries.

The poem opens with “hoking,” which is a colloquial word for digging: “When I hoked there, I would find / An acorn and a rusted bolt” (Lines 1-2). Digging—or hoking—is a constant motif in Heaney’s poetry and is the thesis statement of his collection Death is a Naturalist, where he declares: “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it” (“Digging,” Lines 29-31). Instead of keeping his paternal family tradition and becoming a farmer—working, tilling, digging the land—Heaney wrote poetry. He never gave up digging, though; he uses his words to investigate ideas that lie underneath the surface of everyday thoughts.

What Heaney finds when he hokes the land are fundamental elements of nature and industry. An acorn grows into a massive oak tree, and a bolt holds machinery together. But the acorn will not grow if removed from the soil, and a rusted bolt cannot work in a machine. These examples suggest interdependency and reliance; both sides must work toward a goal.

From the ground, the speaker looks up to “a factory chimney / And a dormant mountain” (Lines 3-4). These are essential landmarks of his homeplace. As Heaney explains, “The factory was Clark’s linen mill,” or William Clark and Son’s Linen, which has been there since 1736 and is still a member of the Irish linen guild (Heaney, Seamus. “Something to Write Home About”). The dormant mountain is possibly Slieve Gullion, a nearby extinct volcano in Armagh. Gullion is strongly associated with Irish folk heroes Fionn mac Cumhaill and Cú Chulainn. The speaker finds himself surrounded by the historical boundaries of his mother’s family—who worked at the mill—and the ancient Irish folklore he learned from his father.

Next, the speaker hears “an engine shunting / And a trotting horse” (Lines 5-6). These sounds demarcate the time as the late 1940s, when horses were used more for travel and in farming, but cars and tractors were coming into more regular use. The sounds can mark the place too: A farm that’s close enough to town to hear industrial sounds.

Heaney closes the first stanza with a question to the reader: “Is it any wonder when I thought / I would have second thoughts?” (Lines 7-8). In this case, the speaker acknowledges that growing up between different traditions and a period of rapid technological change can cause some indecisiveness. He also notes that second thoughts are a type of code-switching in Northern Ireland: “Second thoughts are an acknowledgment that the truth is bounded by different tearmanns, that it has to take cognizance of opposing claims” (Heaney, “Something to Write Home About”). In this definition, truth depends on who you are and from where you come.

The second stanza features two different stories that Heaney learned in childhood. From one parent, he learned “of the prudent squirrel’s hoard” and how the resources saved away for the future “shone like gifts at a nativity” (Lines 9-10). From the other parent’s family, he learned the Biblical story in the Book of Luke of the unjust steward and “the mammon of iniquity,” or money hoarded unjustly, so that he felt guilt for his savings: “The coins in my pocket reddened like stove-lids” (Lines 11-12). It is unclear which parent taught the speaker these lessons, and this lack of clarity is the point: Cultural stereotypes of Catholics and Protestants cannot hold up in individual contexts. Stereotypes divide and demarcate identity, the poem offers, but they are not helpful.

The poem’s original version published in The London Review of Books ends Stanza 2 with an ambiguous tone. However, the version of the poem printed in The Haw Lantern includes these lines: “I was the march drain and the march drain’s banks / Suffering the limit of each” (Lines 13-14). Heaney explains that when he was growing up, marching was a “verb meant to meet at the boundary, to be bordered by, to be matched up to and marked up from; one farm marched another farm; one field marched another field; and what divided them was the march drain or the march hedge” (Heaney, “Something to Write Home About”). In this context, the march drain is a stream that marks the boundaries between two farms. Heaney felt that he himself was a border and the space around this border. To be both a hard border and a liminal space strains Heaney, but he tolerates the strain.

The final stanza involves balance as a motif. Heaney carries the two buckets of familial identity all his life: one for his father and one for this mother. Both buckets are “easier carried than one” because they balance out weight from each side of his ancestry (Lines 15-16).

The speaker continues with the balance imagery by describing an old grain scale with two sides: one side held “the standard iron weight” and the other the grain, which he “tilted […] in the balance” (Lines 17-18). As with the buckets he carried, he must use both hands to physically move and weigh the grain harvested from his father’s farm. He has his hands full with maintaining this equilibrium.

Next, Heaney goes back to the local subdivisions between areas of land: “Baronies, parishes met where I was born” (Line 19). He was born in between the formal governmental divisions of land. The march drains and the river Moyola helped to map out these municipal boundaries. However, history designed these legal boundaries, and history designates who can make official maps. When Heaney imagines himself as the “last earl in horseback in midstream,” he refers to Hugh O’Neill just before the Flight of the Earls (1607). This scene is a tableau of O’Neill’s capture, parley, and brief pardon from his friend, the Earl of Essex. The two men met in the middle of the Moyola and in the middle of a turning in Irish history, which would determine the distribution of land for generations.

The other characters in the tableau of O’Neill in the river are different depending on which version of the poem you read. The earliest version features O’Neill’s “kernes,” or foot soldiers. In this version, O’Neill is talking his men down from a fight that he started. The 1987 version of the poem in The Haw Lantern uses the word “peers” instead. This minor alteration changes the characters in the poem from his subjects to his equals. The newer edition of the poem speaks directly to Heaney’s poetic contemporaries in Northern Ireland and the detente between O’Neill and Essex. “Terminus” ends by suggesting that open communication can help mediate a tense situation. It also ends in stasis, in the middle of the stream, with no answers reached. This poem is ultimately concerned with the liminal spaces between Ireland and the UK, Catholic and Protestant identities, past and present, borders between neighbors, and the cultural tensions within one person. “Terminus” meditates on how to navigate these tensions.