Boustrophedon between Hellas and Home

Abstract

Seamus Heaney did not actually visit Greece until 1995, a trip ‘long promised, long deferred’, followed by a later visit to Delphi, which added a tribute to Zbigniew Herbert and two further ‘Sonnets from Hellas’ to the four set in the Peloponnese. These were all published in Electric Light in 2001, as was the superb poem ‘Out of the Bag’, which works in a ‘pilgrimage’ to Epidaurus. The aim of this short study will be to trace the topography of Heaney’s Hellas poems in order to bring out his vivid observation of locality and landscape. At the same time it will consider the associations that the Greek settings bring to his mind, especially those of other places: hyperborean Poland, Harvard, Lourdes, and, above all, the myth-haunted island at the far north-west of Europe.