Station Island (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Seamus Heaney
- First Published: 1984
- Type of Work: Meditation
- Genres: Poetry, Meditation
- Subjects: Murder or homicide, Missions or missionaries, Ghosts or apparitions, Poetry or poets, Catholics or Catholic Church, Pilgrims or pilgrimages, Ireland or Irish people, Meditation, Priests, Peasantry or peasants, Prayers
The Poem
“Station Island” is a long meditation on Seamus Heaney’s own poetry. The poem sets forth a series of encounters with “ghosts” or remembered figures, many of them from Heaney’s own life, some from his reading. The poem takes its title and major setting from Station Island in County Donegal, a devotional shrine; the “stations” there are fixed locations of prayer. The poem is, briefly, a parallel to Dante’s Purgatorio (c. 1320).
The “I” of the poem is Heaney himself. A few of the ghosts are identified by the text or by Heaney’s notes....
[The entire page is 1850 words long]
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