The Golden Bough
(Aeneid, Book VI, lines 98-148) Seamus Heaney tops and tails Seeing Things with his own versions of passages from classical masterpieces, the first snippet borrowed from the pre-Christian classical mythology of Virgil and ending with a Dante passage from the Christian era. In both cases the narrative is not Heaney’s as such, but he employs all his compositional skills to produce a polished translation. In conversation with DOD (p319) Heaney explained how the collection’s texts linked up: the relationship between individual poems in the different sections has some thing of the splish-splash, one-after-anotherness of stones skittering and frittering across water. Thus the collection’s themes, motifs, moods and key […]