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How does Seamus Heaney's Glanmore Sonnets, specifically sonnet I, portray the theme of marriage?
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Sonnet I of Seamus Heaney's "Glanmore Sonnets" portrays marriage both literally and metaphorically. It celebrates the union of Heaney and his wife, Marie Devlin, while also symbolizing the integration of poetic art with everyday rural life. The imagery of "vowels ploughed into other" reflects both the merging of names in marriage and the blending of art and life. The poem emphasizes creation and fertility, paralleling farming with poetry and marriage.
Heaney explicitly called the Glanmore Sonnets his “marriage poems,” but in the broadest sense they refer not only to the union between the poet and his wife but also to his acceptance of art as a part of his life and career. The first sonnet of the cycle in particular celebrates the joining or metaphorical marriage of art and everyday life.
The sonnet’s striking opening phrase “Vowels ploughed into other” can be interpreted on two levels. In an autobiographical reading, this phrase can be viewed as perhaps the most literal reference to Heaney’s marriage to Marie Devlin found throughout the entire poem. In marrying and joining their names as a couple, their “Vowels” (metonymically, their names) were mixed, or ploughed into one another, as one might say.
For a poet like Heaney, however, “Vowels” can represent poetic language in general, and not just proper names. Thus, in a more metaphorical...
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sense, when the poet moved after marriage to a more rural location, his activity as a poet became integrated or “ploughed into” the country and farm life that surrounded him. This union or marriage of rural life and lofty poetic art was certainly a fact of Heaney’s life. On the other hand, there is a long literary tradition of writing about ploughing and farming in general as metaphors for poetry, and Heaney’s sonnet is just one more contribution to this lineage.
Farming is easily connected in a metaphorical sense to art: both are about the cultivation and creation of something new, something that springs from life-force. This sonnet obliquely connects marriage as a third element, since it too is closely connected to fertility, creation (the birth of children), and tending to life. Though overall the poem does not draw direct connections to marriage, it signals some of them through its reference to the warm February, “spring stations,” and “Easter,” as spring is also thought of in close connection to love, romance, and creation. The same could be said of the simile Heaney’s sonnet contains connecting farmland and a “rose.”
Stepping back into the context of Heaney’s life, the poem expresses an acceptance of domestic life and marriage in a rural area as a new chapter in the poet’s life. Indeed, the poem avows that this new life represents an advancement in art:
Now the good life could be to cross a field
And art a paradigm of earth new from the lathe
Of ploughs. My lea is deeply tilled.
Satisfied, joyful, and content in his new life and marriage, Heaney finds a surprising but welcome companion to his previous life. In fact, the sonnet closes with a collision of his past or “ghosts” and the “spring stations” of rural life. As surprising as “freakish Easter snows,” Heaney’s past and present poetic art merge in a fruitful union, just as ploughing upturns buried soil to bring it to the surface for a new crop, and just as marriage brings two independent people together to jointly create something distinct.