Out of the Bag Flashcards
1
Q
Childhood innocence and imagination
A
- Seamus Heaney’s “Out of the Bag” illustrates the power and potency of an innocent child’s imagination. The poem’s speaker, whom readers can take to be Heaney himself, explains (in a way) how he and his siblings were born. But this isn’t your textbook discussion of the birds and the bees: instead, Heaney asserts that “All of us came in Doctor Kerlin’s bag.” That is, the young Heaney thought the family doctor delivered babies much as a postman delivers a package. Through this story, Heaney illustrates how children’s imaginations try to make sense of events they don’t quite understand.
- The poem suggests that adult knowledge, once “out of the bag,” can’t be stuffed back in. Yet Heaney can still appreciate the suggestive power of a young child’s mind; his childhood perspective remains potent and accessible. In fact, he ends the poem with a description of himself as a child at his mother’s bedside: “The room I came from and the rest of us all came from / Stays pure reality […] Standing the passage of time.” The stories he told himself as a child were so powerful that, even as an adult, the memory still feels real and true. He may no longer see the world through a child’s eyes, but through the work of imagination, he can still recapture that innocent outlook.
2
Q
Myth, Medicine, and Healing
A
- In “Out of the Bag,” Seamus Heaney muses on the connection between mystery, belief, and medicine. The poem implicitly compares the young Heaney’s innocent beliefs about childbirth with scenes of the adult Heaney’s visits to sites of healing in both Greek myth and Catholic tradition. On one level, this suggests that modern religion and ancient myth aren’t all that different from the stories naïve children tell themselves about how the world works. Yet the speaker doesn’t entirely dismiss the power of belief to create “reality” and, indeed, serve a healing purpose. Medicine isn’t just a scientific discipline, the poem suggests; it’s also the domain of faith, myth, and the miraculous.
- He also suggests that the power of mythical sites is not unlike “the cure / By poetry that cannot be coerced.” In other words, he thinks there’s something genuinely transformative about these places where medicine was associated with the divine. They can “cure” people in much the same way art, or art-making, can provide fulfillment and a soothing release. Just as the rituals of childbirth struck the young Heaney as mysterious and compelling, the rituals of healing retain a kind of magical, even mythical, significance for the adult poet.
3
Q
Poetry and the Creative Process
A
- Parts of “Out of the Bag” emphasize the healing power of art, and link Heaney’s meditations on birth and “incubation” to the creative process itself. While the young Heaney didn’t understand what was happening when the formidable Doctor Kerlin arrived, the adult Heaney connects the power and mystery of medicine with that of art and poetry. He even goes so far as to suggest that poetry can be both generative and healing in its own right. It’s not just doctors and poets who can exercise these godlike powers, either: mothers (including Heaney’s mother) are like artists, too, bringing forth new life.
- Notably, Heaney’s mother not only gave birth to him and his siblings, she also invented the story that helped Heaney make sense of where babies come from. In this way, she’s a storyteller as well as a mother. Like a writer successfully bringing a long poem to fruition, she shares the news of her achievement in a “hoarsened whisper of triumph”—even though she herself never takes credit for “the new wee baby the doctor brought for us all.”
4
Q
Origins, Myth-Making, and Memory
A
- “Out of the Bag” begins and ends in the same setting: “The room I came from and the rest of us came from.” As the poem comes full circle, Heaney ties memories of family births into a broader exploration of where people come from and how stories shape their lives and sense of self. In Heaney’s case, his own origin story becomes a kind of myth: as a young child, he believed that he and all of his siblings arrived in Doctor Kerlin’s big black bag. But this story is itself a kind of inheritance, since it was Heaney’s mother who planted the seed in his imagination. And even though the story wasn’t true, Heaney can’t help but return to it throughout his life, just as he mentally revisits the room where he and his siblings were born. In this way, the poem’s title (a pun) takes on additional meaning: the “Bag” becomes, metaphorically, the repository of stories, fantasies, and memories Heaney carries with him still.
5
Q
Were empty for …
… door and leave
A
- By the time Doctor Kerlin comes back out of the room, the bag is empty. Though the speaker seems enthralled by the bag, he describes it in a somewhat ominous way: its “trap-sprung mouth,” he says, is “Unsnibbed and gaping wide.” It’s as if the bag is an animal, with a wide, yawning mouth ready to snap shut at any moment. Like the word “lug,” “Unsnibbed” is a regional term, in this case associated with an Ulster-Scots dialect. Heaney, who was from County Londonderry in Northern Ireland, often peppers his work with words like these, which hint at the colorful linguistic environment he grew up in.
- In line 9, the speaker again uses the plural “us,” suggesting that he’s not the only one in the family staring at the doctor. Throughout this passage, enjambment creates brief moments of suspense—compelling the reader’s interest as the bag compels the speaker’s—and makes the sentences seem to “wind” down the page
5
Q
All of us …
… spaniel’s inside lug)
A
- “Out of the Bag” begins with a strange declaration. Speaking in the first person plural, the speaker announces that “All of us came in Doctor Kerlin’s bag.” As the poem progresses, it will become clear that “us” refers to the speaker and his siblings. (Heaney himself was one of nine children!) And who is Doctor Kerlin? The poem is about to sketch him in great detail, but for now, the speaker seems more interested in the bag he’d “arrive with.” Even as Doctor Kerlin vanishes into “the room” and prepares to do his work, the speaker stays fixated on the bag, keeping track of whether it’s open or closed, empty or full.
- Already, then, there’s something mysterious about the bag. But there’s also something ominous about the doctor. The speaker isn’t allowed to follow him into “the room” (notice how the definite article “the” sets the room apart, signaling that there’s something special about it). At the same time, Doctor Kerlin’s arrival seems familiar or habitual: clearly, it’s happened more than once before.
6
Q
To be squired …
… chill of tiles,
A
- The young speaker seems fixated on the details that mark Doctor Kerlin as wealthy and accomplished—and these are the details that continue to stand out to the adult Heaney as he looks back. Doctor Kerlin, by his very appearance, symbolizes wealth and a kind of forbidden knowledge. He stands out in the rustic farmhouse, and he seems to expect to be waited on, or “squired,” like a knight or nobleman. To the young Heaney, Doctor Kerlin is extremely impressive, and his power seems absolute.
- Doctor Kerlin’s eyes are so piercing and clear, they’re like “[t]wo peepholes” the speaker can look straight through. In his mind’s eye, they’re a glimpse into the “locked room” upstairs—the mysterious, off-limits site of the doctor’s visit. The young Heaney pictures this room “Every time [Kerlin’s] name was mentioned,” a testament to the doctor’s power over his imagination. He pictures a clean, cold, white-tiled, sterile room, suggestive of “skimmed / Milk and ice, swabbed porcelain,” and the arctic blue of Kerlin’s eyes. The “white / And chill” of this imagined room might evoke a hospital or laboratory—natural places for a doctor to be—but as the following lines suggest, the young speaker also has in mind something like a meat locker or slaughterhouse.
7
Q
With the bag …
… on the forceps.
A
- The speaker continues to associate Doctor Kerlin with fine, “spaniel-coloured” things: in this case, his “fur-lined collar,” which matches the interior lining of his bag. He’s impressed by Kerlin’s wealth and sophistication. Kerlin is eminently clean (he trails “a whiff / Of disinfectant”) and refined, perhaps in contrast to the speaker’s more rustic surroundings. He almost seems to “gleam”; looking at him is like glimpsing “a Dutch interior.” This metaphor might allude to a painting like The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632), by the famous Dutch artist Rembrandt, in which a surgeon stands over a cadaver and holds a shiny pair of forceps.
8
Q
Getting the water …
… suddenly behind him
A
- The speaker remembers what would happen toward the end of Doctor Kerlin’s visits. After Kerlin went “stooping up to the room,” it was time to “Get[] the water ready.” This task had to be done just so. The water couldn’t be “plumping hot” or “lukewarm”: it had to be “soft, / Sud-luscious,” and “saved” for the doctor specially “from the rain-butt.” This seems to be the speaker’s job, and he takes it very seriously: the family is going out of their way to be obliging and hospitable. It’s important that they leverage what resources they have to show the doctor their appreciation. Consider, also, that Heaney remembers the doctor’s visit as a process made up of discrete, orderly steps. Just as this section as a whole links the figure of the doctor with that of the artist, these lines link childbirth with a disciplined, creative process.
9
Q
steel hooks, chrome …
… in his buttonhole.
A
Once again, the enjambed line at the end of a stanza generates suspense and surprise, as line 31 reveals an unexpectedly grim vision. The young Heaney pictures Kerlin working amid chilly “tiles, steel hooks, chrome surgery tools / And blood dreeps.” This sounds less like a doctor’s office than an abattoir or slaughterhouse! Mystified as to what Kerlin is actually doing on his periodic house calls, the speaker envisions a room in which “little, pendent, teat-hued infant parts” dangle “overhead,” waiting to be assembled.
10
Q
Poeta doctus …
… cannot be coerced,
A
- Part II picks up in a very different place from where Part I left off. Not only has the poem jumped in time, it’s broadened in scope. The first two stanzas of Part II show that Heaney isn’t just reminiscing about childhood; he’s thinking more broadly about medicine and myth, and connecting those themes to his reading and travel.
- The same goes for Catholic shrines like Lourdes, according to the poet and classicist Robert Graves (on whom Heaney bestows the same title, “poeta doctus”). Then, in lines 42-43, Heaney adds poetry itself to the mix. Poetry, he claims, offers its own kind of “cure,” which “cannot be coerced” or forced. Perhaps it can’t even be fully understood—and therein lies its mystery and power. These last two examples (Lourdes and poetry) are linked by internal anaphora: Heaney introduces both with the phrase “Or of,” as if citing key evidence in an effort to bridge myth, faith, medicine, and literature.
11
Q
Say I, who …
… met the god…
A
- This idea crystallized for him while he was visiting the ruins of the ancient Greek city of Epidaurus. That “whole place,” he writes, “was a sanatorium / With theatre and gymnasium and baths,” where patients could recuperate in body and mind. There, the arts (like drama) were thought to be as necessary to a person’s healing as facilities for physical therapy. (Notice how the polysyndeton here—the repeated use of “and” instead of commas—lends each example the same weight or importance: “With theatre and gymnasium and baths.”) Heaney points to a holistic, even spiritual kind of healing, one that’s markedly different from modern Western medicine.
- Line 49 trails off in an ellipsis. It’s almost as if Heaney, who’s speaking the poem, has momentarily dozed off. Perhaps he’s even entered that state of “incubation” which promises “epiphany,” or an encounter with “the god.”
12
Q
Hatless, groggy, shadowing …
… grass and hallucinated
A
- After trailing off in line 49, the poem suddenly shifts time and place again. It’s as if Heaney is having the kind of mystical vision he linked with the practice of “incubation” in line 47.
- Appropriately, line 50 begins in a disorienting way. It starts in media res, or in the middle of things, without any setup. Heaney is bare-headed, “groggy, shadowing myself,” serving as a “thurifer” (the carrier of the thurible or censer) in an open-air Catholic Mass. But where is this happening, and when? Heaney holds off on revealing the context until line 52: the setting is Lourdes, France in 1956, when Heaney was a teenager. Lourdes is famed as a site for pilgrimages and religious tourism—because, according to Catholic belief, St. Bernadette had her own mystical visions there. (Again, Heaney is subtly connecting ancient visions with modern ones, and religious visions with poetic ones.)
13
Q
Doctor Kerlin at …
… sausage-arms and legs
A
Heaney did say that “incubation” was when “you met the god,” and here’s the god-like figure of Heaney’s childhood, looming large once again. Heaney sees him in the opaque, foggy “scullery window,” and watches as Doctor Kerlin begins to “draw / With his large pink index finger” stick-figure men and women. In this vision, Kerlin literally does have the power to create life, which he does as he traces the little men and women on the glass. There’s something a bit monstrous and sinister, and even grotesque, about him, with “his large pink index finger.” Everything he draws is childish, yet exact: the men have “button-spots in a straight line down their fronts,” and the women are complete “with dot breasts.”
14
Q
That soon began …
… the windless light.
A
- Doctor Kerlin’s control over the scene he’s drawn in the scullery window cannot last. The limbs (the “droopy sausage-arms and legs”) of the dot-faced people “soon began to run.” Kerlin, it turns out, is not a god; he doesn’t have real power over everything. Then the vision shifts. Once “again,” Kerlin is washing up in the basin
- Heaney describes a moment of profound synthesis as the “baby bits all came together.” Think of an artist’s vision for a work of art suddenly coming into place. This is a moment of realization—of “epiphany,” to echo line 49. The doctor/artist/creator has worked a kind of miracle, which is why Heaney marvels, in Latin, “miraculum.” And it’s in this moment that Heaney comes to, “blinded with sweat, / Blinking and shaky in the windless light.” Of course, he’s clammy and “shaky” in part because he’s nearly fainted. But it’s also as if he’s passed through some spiritual or artistic ordeal and come out the other side.
15
Q
Bits of the …
… of the god,
A
- After the strange, hallucinatory stanzas at the end of Part II, lines 68-73 feel like a return to normalcy. No more images of baby parts swirling together! As the vision of Doctor Kerlin abruptly ends, Heaney shifts back into narrative mode, further describing his visit to the shrine of Asclepius at Epidaurus. He has collected some clippings of grass to send to someone battling cancer back home, as well as someone else who has completed treatment.
- Heaney’s actions reveal a deep reverence for Epidaurus. Although he doesn’t necessarily believe that the “Bits of the grass” are going to cure someone’s cancer, Heaney makes a kind of religious offering by sending the clippings back home. It’s not clear that he’s a traditional religious believer, as he was in his Lourdes-visiting youth, but this small spiritual gesture seems to offer its own kind of comfort and healing.
16
Q
The very site …
… the undarkening door.
A
- By explicitly naming Asclepius in line 74, Heaney calls back to the earlier discussion in Part II about sites of healing, where faith and ritual together invite spiritual “incubation” and “epiphany.” Despite the somewhat disturbing vision he had of Doctor Kerlin, Heaney is soothed here at Epidaurus. There’s something restful and restorative about this space—something profound. Heaney just wants to soak it all in, as he explains in a passage full of pleasing /e/ and /i/ assonance:
- Notice that the goddess’s “undarkening door” contrasts with the humble, household “door” Doctor Kerlin “Darken[ed]” back in line 12. Because it leads to a place of pure “light,” Hygeia’s threshold is unshadowed by the problems and flaws of earth. (Heaney may also be playing on the title of one of his best-known poems and books: “The Forge,” from Door into the Dark, begins, “All I know is a door into the dark.”)
17
Q
The room I …
… births and deaths.
A
- In section IV, “Out of the Bag” comes full circle, as Heaney returns to meditate on the room where he was born.
- At the start of the poem, he wrote about his fixation with Doctor Kerlin’s bag, telling how Doctor Kerlin would “arrive with it, [and] disappear to the room.” Initially, Heaney didn’t specify which room that was, or why it was significant. Now, the reader understands that the bag itself was something of a red herring. The real miracle (childbirth) was taking place inside the room, as Heaney’s mother labored to deliver a new baby. Kerlin and his medical kit had only a secondary role in bringing forth new life.
- The essential truth of his story remains even as Heaney grows up and learns how the world really works. As a result, that room or central space “Stays pure reality where [he stands] alone, / Standing the passage of time.” It holds a central, lasting power over Heaney’s imagination and remains accessible to him decades later. (Elsewhere, Heaney called his childhood home his “omphalos,” the ancient Greek word for navel and a metaphor for the center of the world.)
- Heaney then gestures toward the rituals and cycles associated with this space. The presence of special sheets (“put on for the doctor”) alerted Heaney, as a boy, that a major family event was taking place. The sheets are white, or “bridal”; in this poem haunted by Catholic rites and imagery, one might even imagine the bed as a kind of altar and the sheets as an altar-cloth. Heaney invokes the cyclic nature of his family’s “births and deaths” by pairing identical or similar words in lines 84-85: “again and again,” “usual and useful.”
18
Q
Me at the …
… enter every time,
A
- In line 86, Heaney refers to himself as “Me,” as though he’s watching his younger self “[p]eering” up at his mother. There at his mom’s bedside, he’s “incubating for real”—but what does this mean?
- Heaney is recalling Part II of the poem, when he explained that, at Epidaurus, “‘incubation’ / Was technical and ritual, meaning sleep / When epiphany occurred and you met the god.” Heaney isn’t “incubating” in the literal or physiological sense, like a baby gestating in the womb or a virus developing in the body. Instead, the word suggests that this is a moment of growing wonder, mystery, and awe, and that he’s poised on the brink of an “epiphany” or realization.
- Once again, Heaney repurposes a word with a particular symbolic resonance from earlier in the poem. Remember how Heaney called Epidaurus the “precincts of the god”? Here, the same word refers, metaphorically, to his mother’s field of vision. It’s becoming more and more apparent that Doctor Kerlin isn’t the only godlike figure in this poem—Heaney’s mother, too, is associated with life-bringing power. Likewise, she can be considered a kind of artist, and childbirth the supreme creative act. The word “vision” here might even have creative connotations. Heaney might be implying that, just as his mom welcomed him into her “vision” in moments of triumphant creation, he’s now bringing her into his artistic vision by writing the poem.
19
Q
to assist and …
… I was asleep?”
A
- Only in the last lines does the poem reveal the full significance of its title—and the source of Heaney’s childhood misunderstanding about where babies come from. As Heaney stands at his exhausted mother’s bedside, he waits “to assist and be asked” a familiar question “In [a] hoarsened whisper of triumph.” The question is full of delicate irony
- Suddenly, it all makes sense. It was Heaney’s mum who first planted the seed of the idea—the myth—that Doctor Kerlin “brought” babies in his big black bag. She wasn’t ready to be transparent with Heaney about the realities of sex and childbirth. Instead, she implied that his baby brothers and sisters were simply delivered to the house. In doing so, she became another sort of artist: a storyteller. She also humorously (or poignantly) sidesteps her own role in birthing the child, crediting the accomplishment to a doctor who (like Asclepius in lines 47-49) works miracles while mere mortals sleep.
- Heaney’s mother is responsible for the origin story Heaney will carry with him all his life—a charming tall tale that becomes a critical piece of his personal mythology.
20
Q
The Bag
A
- Doctor Kerlin’s bag can contain a whole lot—both literally and metaphorically. The bag was fascinating to the young Heaney, although the poem takes its time revealing why. In the third stanza, the bag is compared to an open mouth, “Unsnibbed and gaping wide.” Later, in line 13, it becomes a “plump ark,” a vessel of biblical proportions. What could possibly be inside?
- In its very impenetrability, the bag comes to symbolize the mysteries of childhood and forbidden, adult knowledge. Heaney projects his childish misunderstandings onto the bag, which he believes contains a newborn baby—or a mixed-up assemblage of baby parts. Through the title especially, the bag also becomes a symbol of memory. It’s “Out of” this figurative “Bag” that Heaney plucks the memories and experiences recorded in the poem. And memory is something he carries with him everywhere, just as the doctor does his bag.
21
Q
Form
A
Although Heaney braids the major themes of the poem throughout all four sections, each part seems to correspond to a different train of thought. Part I sketches young Heaney’s fascination with Doctor Kerlin, and reveals that he believed Kerlin assembled newborn babies before bringing them to the house in his bag. Part II introduces an adult perspective, as a worldly, mature Heaney shares some of what he’s learned about sacred sites of healing. Part II also vividly describes Heaney’s experience at Lourdes, where, faint from the heat, he had a vision of Doctor Kerlin. Part III describes the spiritual experience of visiting the temple of Asclepius in Epidaurus. Finally, Part IV returns to Heaney’s childhood home. This final section reveals, in a bittersweet twist, that it was Heaney’s mom who told him the doctor had brought the “wee baby” while she was sleeping.
22
Q
Rhyme Scheme
A
“Out of the Bag” doesn’t use a rhyme scheme. Because it also lacks a consistent meter, it’s an example of free verse. The lack of rhyme gives the poem a natural-sounding, almost confessional flow. It makes the language, musical as it is, feel fairly spontaneous, as if words are flowing naturally to Heaney as he muses on his childhood. Although many of Heaney’s poems do rhyme—often with a mix of exact and slant rhymes—most of his longer, more meditative pieces (like this one) do not.
