18 pages • 36 minutes read
North
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Symbols & Motifs
The Ship
The longship is perhaps the most prominent symbol in Heaney’s “North,” particularly considering that it voices the latter half of the poem. Though the longship is elevated to the level of speaker, it does not lose any of its symbolic valences. Beyond adding to the land and providing a voice of the past, the ship represents migration, violence, and a tomb.
The ship as symbol of migration and of violent raiding parties is rather straight-forward—bringing people to another land is a basic function of this mode of transportation. The ship’s most interesting symbolic resonance is its connection with death and stasis. While these two things may seem to contradict the ship’s other roles, Heaney’s conflation of past and present means that the ship holds onto its symbolic resonances of the past while developing new ones in the present. During the time in which it sailed the seas, it brought “fabulous raiders” and bore witness to “thick-witted couplings and revenges” (Lines 9, 24). As an artifact, however, all of these things are contained within it in an eternal stasis and the ship becomes a tomb like all the other “solid / bell[ies] of stone ships” that contain the dead (Lines 13-14).
Thor
“North” is full references to the “secular” and “unmagical” nature of things (Lines 3, 5), so its reference to the Norse god Thor may seem to disrupt the poem’s areligious and materialist worldview. However, the poem uses Thor not as an agent of divinity, but as a way for the speaker to engage with a pre-Christian Ireland. Thor is a reference to history rather than religion.
Thor is the god of thunder and lightning in the Nordic pantheon—he is mentioned throughout early Germanic, Saxon, and English civilizations; it is common knowledge that the word “Thursday” originated from a period when Thor was worshiped on the British Isles. In this way, the reference to Thor almost acts as a symbolic bridge between the “word-hoard” of these old worshipers and contemporary English (Line 30).
Furthermore, Thor and his hammer Mjölnir played a significant role in Nordic origin myths, which describe Thor using his hammer to create the land and sea, just as the poem’s speaker describes the “curve of the bay” as “hammered” (Line 2). Though the poem ultimately credits the ocean and Thor’s followers with this earth-shaping rather than the god himself, the language and ideas associated with the god still permeate the present.
The Atlantic Ocean
The gods are given short shrift in Heaney’s “North,” which ascribes their erstwhile powers instead to the “secular / powers of the Atlantic” (Lines 3-4). Not only does this ocean overtake Thor’s position as the force that “hammered [the] curve of a bay” (Line 2), it claims Thor’s other functions by “thundering” (Line 4). In an otherwise secular, physical poem, the ocean takes on the role of a deity.
The ocean also plays a significant role in shaping the individuals that traverse it. When the speaker first references the voices of the past speaking to him, they are “Ocean-deafened” (Line 17). Of course, voices cannot literally be deafened, but there are two likely interpretations of this line. The first is that the voices cannot he heard over the “secular / powers of the Atlantic thundering” (Lines 3-4). The other possible interpretation is that Heaney is using metonymy, a poetic device in which a part of something metaphorically stands in for the whole. Here, the voices are actually people, who have traversed the ocean and been deafened by the experience. This deafening of the people is both literal and metaphorical—enduring the traumas of long migrations and raids hardens the will and can make people deaf to alternative options.
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By Seamus Heaney
