Stanza One

"The Singer's House" starts out with the reaction of the speaker, Heaney, to the reference of an outside group—the unidentified, "they." This group has spoken of Carrickfergus, a medieval city in County Antrim, on the eastern coast of Northern Ireland. Carrickfergus is known for its rich deposit of rock salt that was mined extensively from the 1850s until the early part of this century. When Heaney was writing the poem in the 1970s, many of the salt mines in Carrickfergus had already been abandoned. However, in one of his explanatory footnotes to the poem in the 1991 reprint of Field Work, Heaney makes no mention of this, saying only that: "There are salt-mines at the town of Carrickfergus in Co. Antrim." Instead, the reader must infer from the poem that the salt mines are mainly an item from the past.

This idea is emphasized by "the...