North

The past, In Heaney’s “North,” is represented through physical objects rather than academic study or an individual’s memory. The poem begins with the speaker looking out to the “Atlantic thundering” (Line 4), an image that begins their reverie about the history of the land they stand on. Likewise, most of the poem consists of the speaker’s exploration of physical embodiments of the past. These embodiments, most significantly, are the “fabulous raiders” (Line 9), the “long swords” (Line 12), and the “longship” (Line 20).

Despite their age-old provenance, all of these objects constitute part of the present-day landscape and are represented as active participants in the present. The raiders are “lying in Orkney and Dublin” (Line 10), making them grammatically indistinguishable from any living individual. The swords are still in the process of “rusting” (Line 12) rather than rusted, actively oxidizing while adding a “glinting” to the “thawed streams” (Lines 15-16). Similarly, the longship speaks not only through the poet-speaker, but is actually depicted as having a “swimming tongue” (Line 20) of its own. By using the gerund—a verb form that implies continuous ongoing motion—to describe these objects’ actions, the poet-speaker demonstrates how they live on through to the present.

The past and its artifacts are intimately tied to the speaker’s sense of place.