The poem
I
To-night, a first movement, a pulse, As if the rain in bogland gathered head To slip and flood: a bog-burst, A gash breaking open the ferny bed. Your back is a firm line of eastern coast And arms and legs are thrown Beyond your gradual hills. I caress The heaving province where our past has grown. I am the tall kingdom over your shoulder That you would neither cajole nor ignore. Conquest is a lie. I grow older Conceding your half-independant shore Within whose borders now my legacy Culminates inexorably.
II
And I am still imperially Male, leaving you with pain, The rending process in the colony, The battering ram, the boom burst from within. The act sprouted an obsinate fifth column Whose stance is growing unilateral. His heart beneath your heart is a wardrum Mustering force. His parasitical And ignmorant little fists already Beat at your borders and I know they're cocked At me across the water. No treaty I foresee will salve completely your tracked And stretchmarked body, the big pain That leaves you raw, like opened ground, again
Essentially the entire poem is a metaphor of the political relationship between Britain and Northern Ireland. The relationship, according to Heaney, is like the sexual tension between a man and a woman. Britain is clearly the male, Ireland female. The baby referred is the area of Northern Ireland, the result of the relationship between Ireland and Britain
Very symbolic of the metaphorically feminine Ireland and the masculine England. Intertwined with the sexual 'act of union' from Heaney's own recollection really brings out the beauty and eloquence of the poem.
my take
Heaney greatly captures the essence of the struggle of northern ireland at the time. describing it as a struggling baby fighting to break free from its womb-like borders. the suggestion that this violence was brought about from a dominant male (england) who is portrayed as leering over the feminine ireland who has turned its back to it is sinister. Heaney describes the divide as a gash, a stretchmark that time will never be able to fully restore. Being from n.Ireland i can see only too clearly the difference between ourselves and our southern neighbours although we would still call ourselves Irish.
Errors
Firstly, thank you for the site. However, this poem has a number of errors in it. Please do try to correct it as you are supplying readers with a version that has typographical errors, among others.