In the first stanza of “Limbo” the apparently calm tone in which the fishermen’s grisly catch is revealed is undercut by the consonance of the stuttering “n” sounds which convey at least negation, if not outright disbelief, especially in the second line, which contains the revelation, where the sound occurs five times.
Consonance is used several times in this way, both to convey an emotion and to strengthen an image, as in the sodden sound of “waded in under” in the fourth stanza. Heaney employs assonance in a similar fashion, with the long, groaning “o” sounds of “A cold glitter of souls” followed in the next line by a “briny zone” (here using consonance within the phrase and picking up the assonance in the previous line), reinforcing the iciness of Limbo.
These sounds do much to convey the tone of the poem. The imagery , however, is even more powerful...
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in establishing the theme. The central stanza of five conveys a particularly strong contrast in asimile, followed by a contrasting metaphor:
Till the frozen knobs of her wrists
Were dead as the gravel,
He was a minnow with hooks
Tearing her open.
Here, the initial simile conveys numbness, while the succeeding metaphor is one of intense pain. This contrast emphasizes the awful and unnatural quality of the mother’s action in a physical image. The fishing imagery links this stanza both to the beginning of the poem and to the final striking image of Christ’s unhealed palms, which cannot fish for the soul of the child in Limbo.
What poetic devices does Seamus Heaney use to explore themes in "Aisling"?
Seamus Heaney's "Aisling" seems to be about visions, violation, and cruelty. Indeed, the title of the poem is an Irish word meaning "vision" or "dream," and the poem itself relies heavily upon allusions to the classical myth of Diana and Actaeon. The allusions to this myth are arguably the poem's predominant stylistic feature. In this myth, Actaeon stumbles upon a naked Diana and thus violates, albeit accidentally, her privacy. By way of punishment, he is turned into a stag and subsequently hunted and killed by his own hounds. In the poem, when the speaker poses the rhetorical question "Are you Diana...?" he is perhaps addressing someone who he suspects of unfairly punishing somebody else. Or, more broadly, he is perhaps referring to a relationship which he thinks is characterized by violation and cruelty. A rhetorical question, as a poetic device, often has an implied answer. The implied answer in this case may be that the "you" being addressed is, like Diana, guilty of cruelty.
The victim in the poem seems to be the man represented by Actaeon. In the first stanza, this person is said to have "courted" the woman with "a decadent sweet art." The speaker then uses another poetic device, a simile, to compare the man's "art" to "the wind's vowel / Blowing through the hazels." This naturalistic imagery, coupled with the word "sweet," implies that the man is good and blameless. He meant to be no more intrusive than the wind, and his intentions were good and "sweet." His punishment, by implication, was thus cruel and disproportionate.