Week 15 Analysis

This week I will be doing a literary analysis of Seamus Heaney poem "The Strand at Lough Beg". The literary devices that i see that Heaney use are Genre, Imagery, Point of View and Tone. He shows that the genre is a tragedy by saying something before his poem even starts which was in memory of Colum McCartney. He shows imagery in the way he is describing the situation and the scenery like how he does in the beginning of his poem he describing what he sees "Leaving the white glow of filling stations And a few lonely streetlamps among fields" (p.984). He continue to do this through out the poem and makes it feel like are almost there. The point of view of this poem I believe if form the authors perspective since he is telling this story. The Tone of the poem this kind of dark and scary violent situation based on how he describes how dark it is and the sounds of gunshots. For this poem it was a bit hard for me to identify a theme in this since he was basically just telling a story and not really giving any opinions on what he thinks and because poem are just plain hard for me to see themes. The theme to me seems to be there is a lot of unnecessary violence in the world. What this means to me is i can leave my house today and get shot by a random stray bullet because two guys were fighting over who had the right of way in an intersection, this also mean stealing and many other violent things that can happen to me or anyone else at any moment. I think this plays out well in the poem because it seems like they were out at night and were met by people who maybe wanted something from them and his friend ended up being hurt by a gunshot i think. I also think this poem was heavily influenced by real world events that was happening in the authors life, in northern Ireland in the 1960 there was a lot of violence due them fighting for independence from the united kingdom which the rest of Ireland had done. This directly shows in most if not all of his work.