Crossings xxxiii

  From cover to cover Seeing Things features a series of interfaces: journeys in and out of real world situations; between real and mythical; between secular and spiritual; between existence and annihilation; between objective and subjective; from the present into the future; between first order experience and seeing things again. Such crossings require a range of access points: doors, windows, gates, casements, a moment of final unroofing. Heaney indicated to DOD (p.25) that the poem was set specifically at The Wood farm inherited from great-uncle Hughie into which the family moved from Mossbawn following the death of the poet’s brother Christopher in 1953; it was partly rebuilt: one of the twelve-liners recollects my father’s vision of what the new house […]