The Underground

Heaney dramatises an incident from his honeymoon, dissolving a panicky rush into a version of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Underground and Underworld merge in a fusion of reality and nightmare. A London Underground tunnel is the unifying factor: first a memory played out (then),the intimate recollection of a mad rush to get to a Promenade concert at the Albert Hall; the second and third providing (now) imagined associations: first a character from German folklore lost in a dark forest then the scene of an Underworld trap into which a figure from classical mythology fell and lost his wife as a result. We follow two figures in a vaulted passageway leading to and from the Tube; the ‘she’ figure […]