Settings xxi

  The ‘Settings’ sequence presents a chain of backdrops against which personal events and dramas were played out. Within the dynamic period preceding Seeing Things when Heaney deliberately swooped on anything that stimulated memory or association (DOD 320),  he allowed himself to be transported back by the poems that ‘came on’ to the sites, moments and emotions of previous experience, from where he weighed up what ‘in time … was extra, unforeseen and free’ (Markings I). The poem expresses a move away from the Catholic lessons to which Heaney was exposed as a boy (he might have said ‘overexposed’); his sole experience of firing an air-rifle (Once and only once) brought about a re-appraisal of soul, death and eternity. The […]