Out of the bag - Seamus Heaney Flashcards
‘All of us came in Doctor Kerlin’s bag.’
- doctor appears like a god-like figure
- childlike meditation of history of origins
‘disappear’
‘reappear’
juxtaposition
‘Those nosy, rosy, big soft hands’
use of assonance and rhyme to create a fond, awestruck and childlike
‘Then like a hypnotist Unwinding us, he’d wind the instruments’
- simile, creates a sense of trickery
- terrifying imagery
- doctor - puppetmaster - omnipotent
‘Sud-luscious, saved for him from the rain-butt
And savoured by him afterwards,’
- mimics the childlike innocence of the narrator at the time
-sensory imagery and use of sibilance adds to the dream like quality of the poem
‘Hyperborean, beyond-the-north wind blue, Two peepholes to the locked room I saw into’
- Greek mythology
- ‘hyperborean’ - perfect people who led perfect experiences, the narrator slips into imagination
- ‘two peepholes’ - eyes are the windows to the soul - metaphor looking into the doctors soul
‘And chill of tiles, steel hooks, chrome surgery tools And blood dreeps in the sawdust’
- ominous semantic field - terrifying imagery for a young child
- reminiscent of a horror film
‘Poeta doctus’
a learned poet who refers to the classics
‘Asclepius’
hero and god of medicine in ancient greek, god of healing
‘Lourdes,’
- a town in SW France, a leading place of pilgrimage for Roman Catholics
- heal themselves through faith
‘Epidaurus’
a small city in ancient Greece
‘sanatorium’
antiquated name for specialised hospitals
‘A site of incubation’
to ancient beliefs that people will be healed in their sleep
- links to the incubation of babies
‘epiphany’
a sudden manifestation or perception of something, realising the ancient Greeks were conscious of health
‘thurifer’
a metal censor suspended from chains, in which incense is burned during worship services
‘Doctor Kerlin at the steamed-up glass Of the scullery window, starting in to draw With his large pink index finger dot-faced men’
- presentation of doctor - Zeus-like figure
- the narrator is musing on bringing to life physical things and his creative process to bring them to life
- enjambment, poem is freer
‘blinded with sweat, Blinking and shaky in the windless light.’
- classical imagery, wind associated with forces of creativity - crisis for the past
‘To one going in to chemotherapy And one who had come through. I didn’t want’
musing on the limitations of poetry and how even though it can create miracles, it can’t ease everything bad
‘By Hygeia, his daughter, her name still clarifying The haven of light she was, the undarkening door.’
- Asclepius daughter and goddess of good health
- opposite to the doctor, doesn’t have an ominous effect, but rather a healing one
- crafts a shift from the masculine to Heaney’s own feminine inspiration
‘she’s asleep’
ambiguity - poems gone full circle
‘In sheets put on for the doctor, wedding presents That showed up again and again, bridal And usual and useful at births and at deaths.’
- juxtaposition coming full circle - life and death
- semantic field of rights of passage
‘Me at the bedside, incubating for real, Peering, appearing to her as she closes’
- repetition
- the narrator is disappearing and appearing like the doctor - juxtaposition
- mirroring the first stanza
‘Into a faraway smile whose precinct of vision I would enter every time, to assist and be asked In that hoarsened whisper of triumph,’
- relationships with parents
‘Of the new wee baby the doctor brought for us all When I was asleep?’
- shifting from myth to reality and provides a sense of enclosure
- ‘wee’ - sweet, colloquial tone which contrasts the elevated language of stanza two
Overall messages
- how child’s perspective differ from an adult
- blend personal memory with knowledge of the classical world of ancient Greece to interrogate myths of origin
Structure
- not bound by line length, which echoes how the poet doesn’t allow himself to be bound by people underestimating him
- chapter like sections
- internal rhythm
