A Survey of Seamus Heaney's "lanmore Sonnets" as Modern Pastoral Lyrics

Seamus Heaney, a famous Irish poet after Yeats, has written some pastoral lyrics from his experiences of farm life and childhood memories. These poems, in spite of his simple overt praise of a rustic farm life, have layers of meaning with their vast allusiveness and implications. He is an extremely literary writer dealing with history from the Celtic myth and a long English literary history. Though his style reminds that of a Victorian poet through his allusions of nature, he is a modern poet of innovative skills and senses. The explication of his representative sonnet sequence, the "Glanmore Sonnets" will reveal exquisite, complicated poetics of a modern poet. The poems are basically love poems, and the love is directed to his beloved wife, his lifetime companion. The poems relate the cultivation of a land to the poet's excavating language from the classics and to the images of love making. Through a careful reading of the sonnets this article will broaden our knowledge on how a modern love lyric of layered meanings can retain the past tradition in its complicated poetics.