North

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1985

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Meter and Form

“North” consists of ten unrhymed quatrains—stanzas of four lines—without a consistent meter. The poem shares some elements with the ode, which is a type of lyric poetry directed toward the appreciation or celebration of a particular person, place, or object. Odes have no specific formal requirements and are defined by their subject matter and tone. However, while “North” echoes odes like Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” it has a much more passive and fleeting relationship with its subject matter. For instance, the poem begins with the speaker’s view of “the Atlantic thundering” before the raiders “suddenly” appear (Lines 4, 8), occasioning a mediation on historical artifacts—a mutability of subject that is uncharacteristic of traditional odes.

Heaney’s poem, then, is best understood as free verse, or poetry without any traditional formal restrictions. Instead, “North” relies on Heaney’s careful use of vowel and consonant sounds to give the poem a spoken rhythm that plays with the sounds of Old English alliterative verse. Heaney’s partial engagement with this antiquated form, structured around the quality of a word’s sound rather than its stresses, reinforces the poem’s messages about the value of oral poetry traditions.

Assonance

More than any of the other sound techniques Heaney explores in “North,” his repetition of certain vowel sounds—a technique known as assonance—holds his stanzas together. To show how Heaney accomplishes this coherence, it is necessary to isolate particular sounds. For example, the first stanza foregrounds the long a and er sounds, here marked in bold and italics:

I returned to a long strand,

the hammered curve of a bay,

and found only the secular

powers of the Atlantic thundering (Lines 1-4).

Though the particular vowel sounds change for every stanza, similar repetitions occur in each and give them a sense of sonic coherence.

Personification

The life of the past is so vibrant in Heaney’s “North” that the poem almost suggests a kind of animism, wherein all things are animated or alive. Heaney creates this effect through personification, the technique of giving inanimate objects human qualities.

The most obvious example of Heaney’s use of personification is his representation of the longship, which is not only given the ability to speech, but a “swimming tongue” to speak with (Line 20). This is also seen in the “ocean-deafened voices” and the “invitations of Iceland” (Lines 17, 6), both of which suggest that inanimate things (the dead raiders and Iceland) can not only communicate with the speaker but do so in a human way.

Heaney also uses and suggests personification in subtler ways. The use of the word “hammered” to describe the “curve of a bay” (Line 2), for instance, implies that human intentionality shaped the land, thereby personifying the force that shaped it. The reference to the “solid / belly of stone ships” also reinforces the human qualities of the ships (Lines 13-14), even if “belly of a ship” is a relatively common term of phrase.