Triptych - 12Lit - Heaney

carved

Triptych Panels

equalled

• renders a moment of intimacy in the relationship
• does so primarily through a 'palette of touches'
• interesting and delicate use of SYNAESTHESIA - Sheers using sight toonvey touch
• this continues - language of art used to tactile effect - for example - the woman's hair is shading the man's shoulders with brushstrokes and depth is added by the impression of her breasts
• such details - lead to conclusion that uses touched perhaps in 2 senses - making physical contact and provoking emotional response - speaker deduces that 'bodies like souls,/only exist when touched'
• this moment - taking place right in the middle of the poem - is the apex of the relationship since the next movement offers an unexpected and dramatic climax

• it would be possible to argue for some hope too however
• the flag, like a bandage, has the potential to help heal and the dreams that it prevents, might only be fantasies of wishful thinking
• perhaps a new sense of Welshness - with unfurling the fla in more dignified places - might lead to a more realistic direction for welsh society
• a stronger, more healthy Welsh identity

Hope?

panels of this triptych - tentatively propose:

• some kind of comprehension
• consolation
• or simple endurance

• music of the lines helps to bring free verse to unsettling fine
• blood gathers slowly in the sink - so too do the effects of assonance, sibilance and rhyme as we consider the relationship that 'gave' like a snapped glass
• impressive sense of the hidden nature of other people's feelings and precarious nature of our relationships in this image
• like the glass - language of love and relationships is largely beneath the surface - like the smoke snal - it can take skill to read signals
• as the blood in the image implies - consequences of breaking up - even if largely hidden - will hurt

Final thoughts

• just like a symphony's final movement often contains themes/motifs present earlier on - poem returns to language of writing prominent in the first
• now - no longer blank pages suggesting youth and promise but a line break - suggesting relationship has come to a point of completion
• it seems momentous and disturbing as an end if we consider the shock of the previous movement and chilling imagery
• language of the final movement's second stanza appears relatively trivial
• break up - insignificant' no more than a 'caesura' - pause somewhere in the middle of a line of verse
• while momentous when it happened - break fades through time - which may only be possible when considered in cold light of logic and safe distance of hindsight
• what stays with the reader - arresting images of break up and its effects - final one of which is a musing moment of puzzlement as to how it could have happened

IV - Line Break

After a Killing:

• written after the murder of the British ambassador to Ireland, Christopher Ewart-Biggs, July 1976

Sybil:

• girl - who had been, glancingly, a kind of Ceres figure (Roman/Greek goddess) in After a Killing is more deliberately mythologised

At the Water's Edge:

• sets Heaney amid the ancient Christian remains on the islands of Lough Beg

itrees

II - Still Life

After a Killing

III - Eastern Promise

• linked to murder of British ambassador
• 'small eyed survivor flowers', 'Broad window light' and 'the young girl's gift of vegetables - literal
• symbolically resonant
• natural compensations for the persistence of the images of violence
• engrained harshness soothed by the juxtaposition of natural/love imagery
• nostalgic elements yearn for inner and outer peace
• seeking to be protected from their 'country' by their 'country

Sybil

• girl from After a Killing - utters her 'sybilline' prophecy
• Sybils were Greek prophetesses who uttered prophecies in 'frenzied' states
• Sybilline Oracles -valuable source of information for early Christian beliefs
• prophecised apocalyptic passages
• here - faint hope of forgiveness

• new life - returning to 'helmeted and bleeding tree'
• linked possibly to trees in the underworld of Virgil's Aeneid (early latin poem based in mythology)
• AND
• frontispiece drawing by David Jones in his poem about WW1 - In Parenthesis
• these possible influences suggest Heaney has 'risen to the occasion'
• drawing together the grandiose (extravagant in style) and tenderly human - 'buds like human fists' - creates powerful sense of alternative possibility
• releasing hope of some kind of fulfilment

Hope

At the Water's Edge

• Nevertheless - hope is realistically, wearily conditional
• dots of omission / ellipsis - voice failing to find its nerve
• tentative optimism is now a brief interlude
• poem throws attention back to prophecy that shows what will happen without forgiveness

• Loughbeg situated on the lower Bann near the village of Toome
• between counties Antrim and Derry.
• dotted with some small islands the best known being "Church Island"
• here St Patrick spent some time and left the impression of his knees and hands on a large stone by the water's edge
• A monastic settlement was founded on the island, maybe as far back as the 5th Century, by St Thaddeus who is buried there.
• The settlement continued until the middle of the 16th Century and the Church acted as Parish Church until its burning in the early years of the Ulster Plantation (colonising of Ireland by the British)

• Church was in ruin by the year 1603 but in the troubled year of 1798 many women and children were forced to take shelter on the islands of Lough Beg.
• Mass was often celebrated within the " roofless walls of the ancient church "

• change of human form to canine/insectile alternative - evocation of actual Irish present - European profit is a motive which is unidealistically pursued
• 'bleeding tree' - emblem for this Ireland
• final line - ironic and despairing allusion to Shakespeare
• it remembers and reverses Caliban in the Tempest

'Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises, /

Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.'

At the Water's Edge

• Heaney - amid the ancient Christian remains - longing for the humbling postures of Christian penitence (attitude of regret of having done wrong)
• but the religion (something which recommends forgiveness) only offers 'silence'
• holy-water stoup - now only for rain water
• it is here the whole of the Triptych collapses
• backs of of any visionary or religious possibility
• lies now in 'irrevocable' political fact
• British Army helicopter 'shadowing' the march at Newry - which followed as a protest against Bloody Sunday

• title might suggest the allure of a woman from an exotic place
• popular adverts for Turkist delight often featured a sultry woman in the desert and the tagline 'full of Eastern promise'
• but - here it turns out to have other connotations
• location of the east is much further away than we might have expected - not Turkey but Siberia
• perhaps the only promise is a broken one
• Sheers builds tension - first 2 line stanza - a complete sentence that presents the furtive image of the woman concealed beneat a 'dark tent' of hair and the man's portentious request for her to speak
• greater distance between the speaker and the subject - suits the coldness of the movement
• he recounts the experience as if it were happening to someone else
• remainder of it comprises of thermal imagery and harsh sounding consonants - help to convey the chilling message that the relationship is over - not stated directly but implied
• swirling sibilance underscores the sudden build up of coldness - contrasts starkly with earlier intimacy
• hard c and k reinforce impact of what is said
• final image conveys explosive sudden shift in temperature in atmosphere and the relationship

best

lovers

engaging

f

• images in Y Gaer are also reminiscent of others in collection - 'veins mapping' might remind us of poet's father and his 'affection for the order of maps' as well as 'quiet moments beside a wet horse' that he associated with his mother in 'Inheritance'
• details of the horse may also remind us of 'The Farrier' and its reverence for traditional country lore
• details seem appropriate to a pair of poems in which the consolations for grief are exposure to the natural world - as well as sense that we are a part of an on-going family of people rather than just an individual - sentiments which are evoked in 'Farther', 'Trees' and 'Swallows'

k

Images

j

g

h

• perspective shifts - as it does for many who climb hills - and now he has reached top, speaker gains clarity and sense of vision that is possible from this vantage point - land offers 'an answer to any question'
• idea is echoed in collection's final poem 'Skirrid Fawr'
• perhaps we feel that the speaker has achieved enough distance and enough empathy to gain an insight into the bereaved man's actions

media

a

b

brand-burn

volte

finding

small

secret

Empathy

broken

• sense of empathy between the speaker and the man going out in the storm
• poem reaches an elemental climax as the hillside weather provides both comfort and mortification - 'shoulder' 'lean full tilt' 'take the rain's bleating' 'hail's pepper shot'
• also offers catharsis - or even a kind of primal scream - he is able to express, presumably, what he would be unable to in a social context and 'shout into the storm'
• reaches an answer of some sorts then 'something huge enough to blame'
• not a completely satisfying conclusion - suggested by faint half rhyme 'storm' 'blame' - might feel that blaming the external world - he is blaming everything and so is recognising his bereavement

skin

a

o

The Old Conflict

back

h

waters

c

• 'light' of poetry in Oysters - darkened by subsequent shadows of Triptych and The Toome Road
• consumed by ideas of 'Old Conflict' - the troubles
• oracular (relating to an oracle)
• vatic (describing what will happen in future)
• quasi-Yeatsian rhetoric (seemingly like Yeats in persuasive writing)

• Triptych - persuasively magisterial and authoritative air to poem's pained view of Ireland's 'present' state
• South - mercenary acquisitiveness
• North - sectarian violence

trace

scar

spine's

disturbance

mark

e

creativity

.

finally

tattered

flags

flying

l

i

lust

bed

fupon the floor

worked

fading

n

p

laid

d

memory

night

Triptych

will

Edward Hopper's

Attending to her private affairs, the anonymous woman is unaware of any viewer's gaze.

The painting exposes the voyeuristic nature and opportunities of city life - contradiction in offering access to the intimate lives of strangers and urban loneliness and isolation.

The city at night is a frequent subject in Hopper's work of the late 1920s and early '30s.

Here, the composition of three windows allows for a dramatic setting of illuminated interior against dark night, a juxtaposition the artist identified as "a common visual sensation."

Night Windows

Definition:

• a work of art
• usually a panel painting
• divided into three sections / three carved panels that are hinged together and can be folded shut or displayed open
• middle panel is typically the largest and it is flanked by two smaller related works, although there are triptychs of equal-sized panels
• Associated with Christianity and Catholicism