The Haw Lantern

The Haw Lantern By Seamus Heaney New York: The Noonday Press, 1987 52 pages First, let us look at a simple, web-based definition of clearance, from http://www.answers.com/topic/clearance: The act or process of clearing. A space cleared; a clearing. The amount of space or distance by which a moving object clears something. The height or width of a passage: an underpass with a 13-foot clearance. An intervening space or distance allowing free play, as between machine parts. Permission for an aircraft, ship, or other vehicle to proceed, as after an inspection of equipment or cargo or during certain traffic conditions. Official certification of blamelessness, trustworthiness, or suitability. A sale, generally at reduced prices, to dispose of old merchandise. The passage of checks and other bills of exchange through a clearing-house. Physiology. The removal by the kidneys of a substance from blood plasma. Renal clearance. Since poets tend to be in love with words in and of themselves, the very sound and metaphor as well as their explicit meanings, my first thought on "Clearances," an eight-poem group in The Haw Lantern, was a clearing - what you come across sometimes after wandering through woods. The volume's blurb tells us that the series is "a sonnte sequence concerning the death of the poet's mother." My first thoughts upon reading these poems was that the poet had spent some time wandering through other subjects - the woods - before arriving at stories about his mother. But clearance is not written until section 7, and it refers to emptiness felt immediately after the death of Mary Heaney: "Clearances that suddenly stood open./ High cries were felled and a pure change happened." Nothing seems right after her death, we read in section 8: "the decked chestnut tree had lost its place .../ my coeval/ Chestnut from a jam jar in a hole,/ Its heft and hush become a bright nowhere,/ A soul ramifying forever/ Silent, beyond silence listened for." Loss and remembrance are thematic throughout The Haw Lantern, beginning with the first poem, "Alphabets," in which Heaney looks back on the days he learned to write, read, and his progression in both through his early youth. He learns about letters with "A shadow his father makes with joined hands/ ... Like a rabbit's head. He understands/ He will understand more when he goes to school." His teacher shows him a trick for writing numbers - two is "A swan's neck and a swan's back/ Make the 2 he can see now as well as say." He associates the forms of objects with the alphabet: "A globe in the window tilts like a colored O [a letter mentioned four times in the poem]" and in its penultimate form reminds him of Roman Emperor Constantine's "You will conquer" - letters will never abandon him, though his youthful days it school are temporally irretrievable. Constantine's vision related to martial victory at the Milvian Bridge in 312 ("In hoc signo vinces"); Heaney's is of

Another masterpiece by the great poet. The sequence concerning the death of poet's mother is extraordinarily moving.