The Rescue

  Nearly two decades have elapsed since Heaney published Somnambulist in Wintering Out. That very short poem was a ‘Wordsworthian’ dream of guilt and repentance closely following Summer Home in which Marie Heaney had been sorely tested by her husband. It demonstrated the poet’s use of a poetic dream to say ‘I am sorry’. The Rescue, similar in brevity and style, exposes the inner recesses of the poet’s consciousness. In a dream sequence that takes place in an arctic wasteland  Heaney delivers his beloved from the snow. It demonstrated the poet’s use of a poetic dream to say ‘I love you’. Somewhere in a dream (drifts of sleep) the speaker chances upon his beloved in life-threatening circumstances (Buried to your […]