Docker Heaney’s docker illustrates the sectarian stance adopted by bigoted unionist Protestant working-men towards the Catholic minority as the poet sensed it in the mid 20th century. He exposes the threatening prejudice lurking beneath the dour, uncompromising exterior of a dockworker. The man sits silent and alone in the corner of a public bar staring at his drink. He is moulded by the dockside environment in which he works: Cap/ like a gantry’s crossbeam/ Cowling plated forehead and sledgehead jaw. His tightly sealed mouth (Speech … clamped in the lips’ vice) is suggestive of a man who communicates only [...]