SOURCE: "Seamus Heaney's Poetry of Meditation: Door into the Dark," in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. XXXIII, No. 1, Spring, 1987, pp. 1-17.

In the following prize-winning essay, Hart analyzes the opposing, yet interwoven themes of Heaney's poetry, maintaining that the poet finds "precedents in a tradition of Catholic meditation but give to the old forms a new complexity and an attractive, personal finish."

Images of dark and light appear so frequently in poetic tradition that, when summoned for contemporary use, they run the risk of being immediately obsolescent. Each poet must dust off the old clichés and glaze them with new varnish. For Seamus Heaney, who is more attached to tradition than most, darkness and light dramatize his most pressing concerns. In his first book, Death of a Naturalist, as Dick Davis has pointed out, "Darkness is associated with an uncontrollable fecundity, a pullulation of alien, absorbing life." Darkness...