Glanmore Sonnets – 10

x With all the twists and turns of Heaney’s subconscious dream the Glanmore Sonnets reach a positive conclusion. The poet’s imagination fired e when he was asleep (I dreamt we slept). His anxiety as regards a major relocation of his own doing has placed him and Marie alongside each other in an Irish Republic peatbog (a moss in Donegal) facing a night under the sky (turf banks under blankets), open to the elements (our faces exposed all night), in unfavourable conditions (wetting drizzle) and deathly pale (pallid) amidst the pathetic fallacy of empathetic nature (dripping sapling birches). There are comforting precedents: a couple with Shakespearean credentials (Lorenzo and Jessica) made it together, far from the warmth of Venice (in a […]