Terminus

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1987

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Literary Analysis

Seamus Heaney is often classified as a poet of the Belfast Group. This group was founded by Philip Hobsbaum in 1963 after he moved to Belfast to lecture at Queen’s University. Heaney was an original member of this group, and he workshopped many of the poems in his first pamphlet at Belfast Group meetings. Michael Longley joined the group shortly after in 1964. However, while this group greatly influenced the early careers and sometime friendship between Longley and Heaney, the group disbanded in 1972. Both poets are still associated strongly with the Belfast Group, even though the bulk of their acclaimed writing was published in the decades since the group disbanded.

The Northern School overlaps with the Belfast group. This school is distinguished by 20th-century writers from Northern Ireland who wrote about everyday life in their home country. Many poets in this school—including Heaney—subscribe to writing in strict form and meter. Otherwise, each poet in this school has a distinctive poetic style.

While “Terminus” was written almost two decades after the Belfast Group disbanded, motifs like digging and the strong colloquial dialect that distinguished Heaney’s early work are still present. Heaney was clearly in his poetic prime when he wrote “Terminus,” showcasing control and maturity; the poem therefore fits into the Northern School too.

“Terminus” continues the dialogue that Heaney had already started in his earlier volumes of poetry like North and Field Work about what it means to be Northern Irish. Like the poems in these earlier books, Heaney writes about the land, his family, and the people around him. The Haw Lantern is unique because it meditates on the deaths of Heaney’s parents, and, by extensions, the poet’s own mortality.

Historical Analysis

Seamus Heaney wrote “Terminus” at a particular juncture in Northern Irish history. The poem was written near the end of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The Troubles started after partition from the Republic of Ireland in 1922 and ostensibly ended with the Good Friday agreement in 1998. In a general sense, these tensions arose because part of the population wanted to keep Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom and the other part wanted to see it united with the Republic of Ireland to the south. There are still tensions today between the two main cultural groups that comprise the north: Catholics and Protestants.

Heaney was born at the start of World War II and grew up through the Troubles. “Terminus” takes place during his childhood, where the events of the war and the Troubles shaped his memory. He watched rapid modernization meet with cultural discrimination against Irish Catholics. Catholics in Northern Ireland had less access to good jobs, fair wages, and decent housing.

By the time he reached adulthood, Heaney could watch the civil rights marches in the American South on television and advocate for Catholic rights in Northern Ireland. The tumult and violence shaped his adolescence and young adult years in Belfast between factions led mainly by the IRA (Irish Republican Army) and the UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force). Though this violence continued to escalate in the 1980s, the Heaneys chose to find peace elsewhere by living between Dublin and the United States. Because Heaney wrote “Terminus” when he was in his late forties and living abroad, the poem is nostalgic for his childhood and when borders were less deadly to him. The Northern Ireland of Heaney’s childhood is a safer space, where boundaries are sanctuaries, fully habitable, and places to slip between.

Finally, Heaney states in Finders Keepers that the earl in “Terminus” is Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, the most powerful lord in Ireland during the reign of Elizabeth I in England. O’Neill managed a fiefdom that threatened Elizabeth, and so she set out to capture him in 1599. At this point in history, the Earl of Essex stopped O’Neill to negotiate in the middle of the river Moyola. Heaney remarks on this encounter: “They were at the terminus in an extreme sense of the word. There was no room for two truths. The brutality of power would have to decide the issue, not the play of mind” (Heaney, “Something to Write Home About”). The two men were friends but on opposite sides of history, and the best quarter Essex could give O’Neill was his own life. O’Neill continued his quest against English rule until his surrender and self-exile in 1607. The queen punished Essex’s loyalty to O’Neill with execution for treason in 1601.

As Heaney points out in Finders Keepers, the places mentioned in “Terminus” are on “a list of lands confiscated by the English after the Elizabethan conquest of Ulster” (Heaney, “Something to Write Home About”). The confiscation of this land prompted the Flight of the Earls, or the large-scale exodus of the Ulster lords from Ireland to continental Europe. This event marks the end of Old Irish rule and Brehon Law.

O’Neill’s self-exile and the Flight of the Earls created a power vacuum that caused a plantation system in Ulster from Scotland and England in the following centuries. This plantation system eventually gave Northern Ireland a Protestant cultural majority and resulted in the partition of Northern Ireland from the Republic of Ireland in 1922.