SEAMUS HEANEY AND THE ALCHEMY OF EARTH

Any point in that wood Was a centre, birch trunks Ghosting your bearings Improvising charmed rings Wherever you stopped...

("The Plantation", Door into the Dark)

The search for an essence, concealed within some awesome and forbidden centre, runs through much of Heaney's work, particularly in the early volumes, underpinning the very processes of his poetic creation. His imaginative focusing on the world of reality be it birch wood, barn, burial mound, blacksmith's forge or well penetrates and ultimately opens up a magic dimension connecting the world of sense and an extra-sensorial dimension. In an autobiographical essay, "Mossbawn", Heaney has related just such an from his own childhood. It describes a mysterious ceremonial where an initiatory fusion with earth and water produces a metamorphosis within the growing boy:

To this day, green, wet corners, flooded wastes, soft rushy bottoms, any place with the invitation of watery ground and tundra vegetation, even glimpsed from a train or a car, possess an immediate and deeply peaceful attraction. It is as if I am betrothed to them, and I believe my betrothal happened one summer evening, thirty years ago, when another boy and myself stripped to the white country skin and bathed in a moss-hole, treading the liver-thick mud, unsettling a smoky muck off the bottom and coming out smeared and weedy and darkened. We dressed again and went home in wet clothes, smelling of the ground and the standing pool, somehow initiated.

{Preoccupations, p. 19) (1)

As suggested here, Heaney' s imagination works not merely on a sensorial level but in terms of symbols, seeking correspondances signs, meanings, hidden in physical reality, but revealing the psychic and spiritual dimension