Seamus Heaney’s Imagination in the Forge
Imagery is perhaps the single most important tool a writer must have to be considered great. Imagery can be described as the representation through language of sensory experience (Arp, 607). This means that everything being written can be related to one of our senses, such as taste or olfactory. Seamus Heaney’s “The Forge” provides us with multiple examples of imagery that touches many of our senses. The images in this poem touch so many of our senses that I find it somewhat more confusing than helpful. It touches on so many feelings that I have a blurry picture in my head rather than a clear and crisp one.
However, I will do my best to interpret this piece. Heaney appeals mainly to two of our senses – sight and smell. He describes how things look and sound. Heaney only briefly tells us about how something looks or sounds. Then our imagination takes this and forms a memory of something similar that we have already seen. Everyone has seen a rusty iron hoop or axle, and that is why Heaney mentions them here. We must imagine a quaint house, perhaps a farmhouse with these objects outside, leaning against an old garage. The old rusty hoops and axes are how the story teller imagines himself.
Heaney writes: “The hammered anvils short-pitched ring” (Heaney, 612). This makes me think of an old wall clock that needs to be wound down twice a day to ensure proper operation. The anvil is the drive that tells the man that his time may be almost up. Through this drive, he searches for what it truly means to live. The man has realized that life is unpredictable, like the tail of sparks, or the sizzle when a new shoe freezes in the water (Heaney, 613). Heaney includes this line because a person looks back on their life and much is just repetition and we are living for the sparks or fleeting moments.
The remainder of the poem describes a new shoe being forged in water, which I think represents the new learning we seek in life. The rest of the poem describes an anvil. The anvil is everything that concerns a person, his actions, attitude, life. At the end of the poem, the person either dies or becomes an adult. The grunts and goes in, with a clang and flick, to beat real iron out, to work the bellows (Heaney, 613). I believe that these last two verses signify the end of the man’s life, because it sounds like the iron anvil is being destroyed, or coming of age, as the iron anvil is being transformed into something more important and valuable. Overall, I feel that the narrator has described what drives us and makes us act the way we do. I also believe that man eventually dies. There are many points that I am not sure about, such as the ending. I am not sure whether a man dies or grows up. Nevertheless, I think this is probably the best poem I have read.
