An analysis of ten poems is rather a lot to ask for in one question, but I shall offer you an analysis of the first five sonnets in the sequence, and hopefully from this analysis you will be able to follow the themes through the remaining five sonnets.
The Glanmore Sonnets, first published in 1979, are a thematically diverse collection of poems concerned for the most part with the relationship between art, the artist, and the natural world.
In the first sonnet of the sequence, Heaney posits an analogy between the natural world and the nature of art. He proposes that art is a “paradigm of earth new from the lathe.” The implication here is that the artistic process is, to continue the metaphor , about ploughing up new ground. Indeed, Heaney suggests that in his own art, his poetry, he has “gorge(d) the subsoil of each sense,” meaning that...
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he has explored and examined the depths of his own senses, and perhaps his own emotions, in the process of writing poetry.
In the second sonnet, Heaney continues with the same theme. He says that he moved to Glanmore in the hope that he might, “from the backs of ditches ... raise / A voice.” Here again Heaney is comparing the awakening of his own poetic voice to an exploration of, or affinity with, the natural world. At the end of the poem, he returns to the plough metaphor used in the first poem and describes “Each verse returning like the plough turned around.”
In the third of the ten sonnets, Heaney’s affinity with the environment of Glanmore seems to become completely harmonious. He hears in the songs of the birds and in the motions of the other animals an “iambic” rhythm. The iambic meter, whereby every other syllable is stressed, is a common characteristic of the sonnet form of poetry. Indeed, Heaney writes each of these ten sonnets using the iambic meter. The opening line of this third sonnet, for example, reads: “This evening the cuckoo and the corncrake.” Here then, from Heaney’s perspective, nature reflects art, and art reflects nature. It is as if the two are synonymous and inter-dependent.
In sonnet four, Heaney reflects on his own understanding of poetic rhythm. He compares his own sense of rhythm to “The head / Of a horse swirled back from a gate,” as opposed to the mechanical, industrial rhythm of “flange and piston pitched along the ground.” Here Heaney is aligning himself with the pulse and rhythms of nature and implicitly distancing himself from the more artificial, mechanical sense of rhythm employed by other poets.
In the fifth sonnet, Heaney reminisces about his experiences of nature when he was younger. He recalls trees with elderberries, and he recalls too playing among the trees, where he “felt another’s texture quick on mine.” The overtly sexual connotations of this image perhaps imply that Heaney associates this landscape from his past with a sexual awakening. This sense of awakening is emphasized at the end of the poem when Heaney recalls crouching among “small buds shoot(ing) and flourish(ing) in the hush.” This sense of awakening implies that the natural world played an important part in Heaney’s maturation, both as an individual and, in the context of the previous poems, as a poet.