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Skirrid Hill

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We have here, yet another image of the creation of men worn away by nature. In this case it is the ruins of a Roman battlement – a symbol of nature’s prevalence over the artificial. Erosion has worn away the fort, in the same way that illness wore down the woman in the previous poem. The farrier is an archetypal masculine, manual labouring figure, creating a contrast with those we see in the industries of service and entertainment later on in the collection (see ‘Services’ or ‘L.A. Evening’. The fact that he is smoking a roll-up suggests an extension of the values of working with hands as well as a rejection of modern innovation and the ubiquitous health warnings on the dangers of smoking; in ‘Wake’ we see a man dying of lung-cancer, as if to create a book-end to this disregard. There is nothing modern about his attire or his physical appearance, the sideburns for example. When you are dealing with a poem in which a writer is taking great pains to draw comparisons between two things often from the natural world and the human world, almost to the point of exhaustion, then this is called a metaphysical conceit. The word ‘caesura’ has also been chosen for its visual and phonetic proximity to ‘caesarean’ however, a word connotes an artificial start to life and childbirth difficulties. In this sense, ‘Line-Break’ could be a reference to the cutting of a lifeline or, more literally, the cutting of an umbilical chord. If you didn’t know, feminine rhyme is like a normal rhyme but with the stress on the penultimate syllable of each line. It can be no coincidence that Sheers, who rarely rhymes, has chosen to use feminine rhyme when dealing with a woman’s battle with breast cancer.

The other strong parallel here is the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina an event which lead to over a thousand deaths and left the City of New Orleans flooded. The final lines seem to echo so many of the images shown from the City of New Orleans at that time: It is of some significance that this is occurring in August, yet the previous poem was Winter… a subtle device for showing the passage of time. Also perhaps the suggestion that in the colder months we are motivated by romance, whereas the warmer times of the year are more carnal and lust-fuelled if we are to take on board the image of a ‘mating season’. In the context of the world Owen Sheers was living in, I think we can draw a few obvious parallels. Firstly, we have the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a conflict which saw the deaths of many Americans who were marched into a situation under false pretences and were killed in their thousands as a result. T.S. Eliot (we are going to be hearing a lot about him as we move through this collection) began his most famous poem (The Waste Land) with a quotation from Chaucer. By following in Eliot’s footsteps, Sheers continues to put himself in line with the poetic canon. This tension is further explored by conflicting the motorway a symbol of progress and linking all of Britain together, with the flag, a symbol of traditional identity. When Sheers’ depicts the Welsh flag ‘high in the motorway wind, / the beast of it struggling to exist’ we get the sense of tradition and innovation being unavoidably at odds with one another.It is an unusual structural choice to preface a collection with an entire poem. Sheers’ choice to have this poem separated from the rest of the work suggests that this is perhaps a key or a map with which to navigate through the rest of the collection, similar perhaps to how some editions of Lord of the Rings have a map of Middle Earth before you even get to the text of the novel.

Movements’ in this sense can be seen as episodes which follow different emotional tones, rhythms and narratives, but essentially tell different parts of the same story. Music and poetry are often very closely linked, and so this sequence here encourages us to make comparisons between the two. Most noticeably perhaps, the different stanza lengths may well be interpreted as different time signatures.

Seamus Heaney and Owen Sheers: Connections, Contexts, Interpretations

It is also an interesting, almost paradoxical, decision to begin things with a poem called ‘last act’. This is perhaps our first clue that Sheers wants his reader to feel uncomfortable and show us that he will be breaking conventions with this collection. The epigraph itself however, has been chosen most judiciously, for there are at least four obvious thematic paths it can lead us down, and several more subtle. Line 1 indicates a theme of age/youth, line 2 indicates a theme of modernisation and the breakdown of society and line 3 indicates a theme mortality and spirituality.

The poem ends with the father scattering his son’s ashes ‘against the tongue of the wind’ by the fort they once went to together. This idea of making ‘the circle complete’ is yet another reference to the tree-planting ritual of Sheers’ father. Notice how the stanzas are arranged into triplets – as this is a poem with music on its mind this could be an allusion to the 3/ 4 time signature used in a waltz… a romantic dance for a man and woman.Sheers’ idea about existence is also aligned with ‘solipsism’, the idea that we can only be sure of our own existence and nobody else’s. The implication here would be that physical intimacy is the only way of being assured of our own existence and role in the universe, which is why we are so predisposed to enter into relationships, even bad ones.

Last Act also serves as a manifesto of sorts for what Sheers’ sees poetry as being. Whereas theatre is based entirely on seeing human beings ‘in-role’ right until the very end, Sheers begins with the bow so that we are left with the honesty of an actor stepping out of character throughout the collection. The description of the ‘china plate of a shoulder blade, the relic of a finger’ puts the fallen dead in line with historical artefacts creating an uneasy emotional distance.

Heaney & Sheers: A Panel Discussion for Schools

The quotation itself ties in with the ideas of national identity in this collection – by depicting a flag as a ‘vital organ’ we get the sense that everyone feels the need to belong somewhere, and so it is vital to the Welsh people that Wales retains a sense of national identity so that its inhabitants aren’t left feeling ‘homeless’. How about if we extend the metaphor of the restaurant as society as a whole even further and we have four main tiers:

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