The Barn by Seamus
Heaney (pg 19)
The Barn
This poem, like Death of a Naturalist, is a
memory of the past. It is about Heaney’s
experience of working in a barn when he was
much younger. Heaney uses vivid similes and
imagery to bring the barn to life. It has an
almost supernatural feel and, by the end of
the final stanza, a real sense of dread and
danger.
Subject and Themes
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Farm life
Danger
Fear
Imagination
Vulnerability
Nightmares – childhood fears
threshed – the corn has been harvested
Threshed corn lay piled like grit of ivory
Or solid as cement in two-lugged sacks.
Opens with two similes
– ‘grit of ivory’ suggests
something valuable;
‘cement’ suggests
heaviness
‘two-lugged’ –
repeated at end
– two handles
like ears –
bringing object
to life
musty – a stale or mouldy smell
hoarded – the word means
stashed away – suggests
hidden trerasure is in the
barn
The musty dark hoarded an armoury
Of farmyard implements, harness, plough-socks.
list of three
armoury – implies the barn’s contents
of farmyard implements are war-like
cold, uninviting imagery
The floor was mouse-grey, smooth, chilly concrete.
There were no windows, just two narrow shafts
like a prison – the purpose of Heaney’s imagery
is to make us experience the claustrophobia
gilded motes – a mote is a speck of dust. Gilded means to have the quality
of gold. You can visualise two narrow strips of dust through the slits in the
barn walls highlighted in the sun from outside
Of gilded motes, crossing, from air-holes slit
High in each gable. The one door meant no draughts
hot, uncomfortable
gable – the triangular area at the top of the barn
All summer when the zinc burned like an oven.
A scythe's edge, a clean spade, a pitch-fork's prongs:
list of three – maintains the steady
rhythm of the poem
sibilance - the ‘s’ sound in these
words emphasises the potential for
danger
simile – the zinc is the metal
that the tools were made of –
you can imagine the heat in
the barn
‘you’ –
addresses the
Slowly bright objects formed when you went in.
reader directly
Then you felt cobwebs clogging up your lungs
– Heaney
wants us to
feel part of the
alliteration on ‘c’ – emphasises a experience
particularly unpleasant feeling
of claustrophobia
adverb ‘slowly’ drives the poem forward
the verb ‘scuttled’ associates with the spiders – a
need to escape
And scuttled fast into the sunlit yard And into nights when bats were on the wing
moves poem forward – a sense of restlessness
Over the rafters of sleep, where bright eyes stared
From piles of grain in corners, fierce, unblinking.
‘rafters of sleep’ – a metaphor –
image of the barn follows the
narrator into sleep
nightmarish – it is only in the dark
when the barn reveals its true
menace. Choice of vocabulary
shows how determined whatever
lurks in the darkness really is
The dark gulfed like a roof-space. I was chaff
To be pecked up when birds shot through the air-slits.
simile – emphasises the enormity of the darkness
metaphor – chaff –
inedible parts of the corn
– the narrator is nothing
better than feed for the
birds
tries to block out the horror he imagines
I lay face-down to shun the fear above.
The two-lugged sacks moved in like great blind rats.
simile - poem ends with moment of real
terror – continues the nightmare theme – like
a horror film – the sacks are rats coming to
get him
Links with other poems…
Most obviously links with ‘Death of a Naturalist’ as
both poems deal with Heaney’s fear of nature
and the ways in which the ordinary can become
threatening or evil. The sacks of corn ‘move in
like great blind rats’ just as the frogs become
‘great slime kings…gathered for vengeance’. We
get the sense from all of Heaney’s poems in the
anthology (except for ‘Mid-Term Break’, perhaps)
that the childhood experiences of agriculture
were not happy times for him or he was unable
to fit in with them.
Hints and Tips
This is a reasonably easy poem to understand and
has a number of key images and techniques that
you can write about. Unfortunately, it does not
link very easily with most of the other poems,
although ‘Death of a Naturalist’ would certainly
be a good one.
You could also link it to the idea of memories which
is also depicted in ‘Miracle on St. David’s Day’,
‘Follower’, ‘Digging’, “Mid-Term Break’, ‘At Grass’,
‘An Unknown Girl’ and ‘Once Upon A Time’.
Example Questions
1. Look again at the poems ‘The Barn’ and
‘Death of a Naturalist’. What do these poems
reveal about the imaginations of the
childhood Heaney?
2. ‘The Barn’ is a poem about memory. Choose
another poem from the anthology which also
focuses on memory and compare the ways in
which they are depicted.