North

Seamus Heaney’s “North” is about the way that the speaker’s body experiences place. Though the poem shows clear indications that history should still be thought of as a linear progression through time, the speaker’s experience of time is porous and unstable. In some lines, such as when the “longship” speaks through the speaker (Line 20), the past seems to co-exist with the speaker’s present. In other lines, such as when the speaker describes the “long swords rusting” (Line 12)—showing the passage of time as the metal oxidizes—there is a clear delineation between the two.

In the poem, Heaney is pointing towards the complex and sometimes contradictory relationship that people have with their cultural history. A person’s cultural history can simultaneously be partially lived and partially forgotten as their mind shifts to accommodate novel ideas, perspectives, and ways of living. “North” argues that the challenge is to find a way to remember and embody one’s cultural heritage without also embodying the parts of that heritage that are incompatible with contemporary life. In the poem, the speaker tries to navigate this challenge through their engagement with place and history, and their embodiment of those two things.

The poem’s first images establish that landscape is mutable and open to change through mundane physical forces—including human intervention. The bay has a “hammered curve” (Line 2), suggesting that they were affected by a percussive force similar to the manmade tools that forged the later “long swords” (Line 12). This comparison continues when the “powers” of the hammering ocean are described as “secular” (Line 3): Though the ocean is powerful, its abilities are as “unmagical” as the “invitations of Iceland” (Lines 5-6). The word choice establishes the speaker as having a materialistic, rather than spiritual, relationship with place. The forces of nature are mechanical, indifferent and, at best, subject to the whims and desires of humanity. “Thor’s hammer” (Line 22), which could be interpreted as what made the “hammered curve of [the] bay” (Line 2), moves not from the god’s own agency, but “to geography and trade, / thick-witted couplings and revenges” (Lines 23-24). The gods themselves are impotent; their powers have become “secular” and subject to human concerns such as “trade” and “revenge.”

The poem presents this transformation through “The longship’s swimming tongue” (Line 20). The longship, a vessel that evokes the ancient Norse we know as Vikings, is a voice from the past. The human concerns that brought it and its “fabulous raiders” (Line 9) to Irish shores are no longer shared by the poem’s contemporary speaker. Instead, it and the raiders’ swords are artifacts that have become part of the physical makeup of Ireland. The swords are “glinting / in the gravel of thawed streams” (Line 15-16): They add to the material of riverbeds, and their “glinting” in the sun beautifies the “thawed streams.” Similarly, the raiders are now also in the “solid / belly of stone ships” (Line 13-14). The ship has become a fossilized “stone” that contributes to the mass and shape of the island, while the raiders are ghostly echoes haunting it. The stone of the ships has shaped the land, just as “Thor’s hammer” was the instrument that made the “hammered curve of [the] bay” (Lines 22, 2) earlier in the poem—the Nordic raids gave shape and material to the coastline.

As their artifacts influence the shape and beauty of Ireland, so the historic raiders influence the Irish culture. The “hatreds and behind-backs / of the althing,” or Icelandic parliament, that the raiders brought with them (Lines 25-26) mirror the political and social issues of the Troubles in the poem’s speaker’s time (see the Contextual Analysis section). It is important to note that in the 6th and 7th stanzas, the speaker is only summarizing the longship’s stories of “thick-witted couplings and revenges, / the hatreds and behind-backs” (Lines 24-25). In this way, the speaker mitigates the raiders’ violence by only focusing on the stories’ main themes—similar to how a plot summary removes the emotional weight of a story. At the same time, however, extracting these themes makes the stories universal and more applicable to contemporary concerns.

However, the poem stops the speaker’s paraphrasing and instead directly quotes the ship in the 8th, 9th, and 10th stanzas. This suggests that what the ship says in the last three stanzas does not need to be changed to apply to contemporary experience. This is makes sense—the last speech moves on from violent stories to a sort of ritual—and it shows that this part of the ship’s message doesn’t need to be translated despite its antiquated, obscure diction.

The ship instructs the speaker, and the reader, to “Lie down / in the word-hoard” (Lines 29-30). “Word-hoard” is a variation of an old English word meaning “vocabulary,” and the action to “lie” implies a restful, peaceful pause, in contrast to the earlier violence. This hoard of words is the treasure collected from a long and complex history, as the English language is an agglomeration of many other dialects and languages. Likewise, the instruction to “gleam / of your furrowed brain” marks a move inward (Line 31-32), away from expansionist violence that brought the ships to the Irish shore. The command to “Compose in darkness” (Line 33) makes it clear that the ship is instructing the speaker to create art—possibly specifically poetry in the oral tradition, as they will draw on the “word-hoard.”

Though the ship wants the poet-speaker to look inward, its focus—like the poem’s—is on the physical. The speaker should create “in darkness,” not using sight so that their other senses might thereby be strengthened. Paradoxically, however, the ship warns the would-be poet to “Keep your eye clear / as the bleb of the icicle” (Lines 37-38), where “bleb” can mean both a small bubble or bulb in the icicle or a glaucoma-related blister on the eye (all of which would distort the image as seen through it). The poet-speaker is not to trust their eyes, nor their mind, but only the “feel of what nubbed / treasure [their] hands have known” (Line 39-40). This physical connection with place and that place’s past, the poet-speaker suggests, is essential to honoring one’s cultural heritage and to avoiding its follies.