Seamus Heaney’s “Station Island”

Abstract

When Seamus Heaney sets out to perform his own rigorous self-examination, he heads not to his dining room, nor to the cemetery or the Caribbean, but, instead, for Station Island, in County Donegal’s Lough Derg. According to legend (and to some medieval maps), a cave on the island is the opening to Hell. Also known as St. Patrick’s Purgatory, the island has long been the site of a Catholic penitential pilgrimage whose ritual comprises vigils, fasting, and prayer while kneeling at and walking barefoot around a series of stone beds. When they have completed the “spiritual exercises,” “pilgrims are granted a Plenary Indulgence applicable to the souls in Purgatory.”1 In Heaney’s poem, both of these significances are in play, as the poet undertakes the pilgrimage (driven, apparently, by a need to repent)2 and, like Dante in Hell and on the slopes of Purgatory, encounters a series of “familiar ghosts,” the shades of relatives, friends, and other writers.KeywordsSpiritual ExerciseCannon BallPoetic VisionSectarian ViolenceIrish HistoryThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.