Literature12 Seamus Heaney: Poems: Bog

for T. P. Flanagan

We have no prairies
To slice a big sun at evening--
Everywhere the eye concedes to
Encrouching horizon,

Is wooed into the cyclops' eye
Of a tarn. Our unfenced country
Is bog that keeps crusting
Between the sights of the sun.

They've taken the skeleton
Of the Great Irish Elk
Out of the peat, set it up
An astounding crate full of air.

Butter sunk under
More than a hundred years
Was recovered salty and white.
The ground itself is kind, black butter

Melting and opening underfoot,
Missing its last definition
By millions of years.
They'll never dig coal here,

Only the waterlogged trunks
Of great firs, soft as pulp.
Our pioneers keep striking
Inwards and downwards,

Every layer they strip
Seems camped on before.
The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.
The wet centre is bottomless.

This poem is, like many of Seamus Heaney’s, about Ireland. It is dedicated to one of his friends, the artist T.P. Flanagan, whose vision of the Irish countryside Heaney cited as an inspiration. Throughout the poem, the bog represents many things and they all have to do with the past. It is the deep past, which is known today through stories and songs, and seen through what Ireland has and does not have compared to other countries. The last line is striking, the poet states that “The west centre is bottomless”. It is a well to the past that does not seem to have an end, but is that worth anything? The speaker wonders if it holds any information useful to contemporary Ireland.