Personal Helicon

• Context

  • Last poem in Heaney's first collection 'Death of a Naturalist'
  • Heaney's childhood characterised by his rural upbringing on his father's farm
  • Poem looks back on his childhood and related to his childhood fascination with the well to his adult fascination with poetry
• Themes

  • Self discovery
  • Childhood/childhood memory
  • Inspiration
• Form and structure

  • 5 quatrains which adds to the contemplative tone and tidy regularity
  • 3 stanzas in the middle reveal how Heaney sought reflection, inspiration, and self discovery in the ells
  • He is now given the opportunity to reflect on this with the final stanza showing a shift in attitude to his former activities
• Rhyme and rhythm

  • Written in iambic pentameter
  • Made up of an altering rhyme scheme (ABAB)
  • Use of half rhyme scattered throughout which reflects his alteration between childhood and adulthood
  • Wells allow personal reflection in youth and poetry does in adulthood
• Title

  • Rooted in ancient mythology - Mount Helicon the site of the stream Hippocrene which was sacred to the muses
  • Mount Helicon is also where Narcissus takes place - Narcissus falls in love with his own reflection when he realises he cannot have what he desires and ultimately ends his life
  • The title draws parallels between the springs and Heaney's inspiration (childhood wells and rural upbringing)
  • Personal shows first person recount
• Tone

  • Contemplative
  • Introspective - he reflects his reasons for writing
• Situation and setting

  • Describing a paradoxical vision of poetic inspiration - how his childhood fascination with wells has become a metaphor for the creative process
  • He looks deep into his mind while writing poetry like he looked into the wells in childhood
• Speaker

  • First person, using Heaney's own voice
  • Like Mount Helicon, Heaney experiences shifts as he grows older and the speaker in the poem denotes his growth
• The innocence and wonder of childhood

  • Sense of wonder and discovery while exploring old wells
  • Celebrates the adventurous joy of childhood while suggesting that growing up entails loss of innocence and curiosity
  • No adult could 'keep' him from the wells and old water pumps that he 'loved' and 'savoured' - the child sees beauty where adults cannot setting up a clear distinction between the worlds of childhood and adulthood
  • Speaker makes it clear he wasn't afraid to get his hands dirty which implies intense sensory experience and deep connection to the natural world
  • Childhood innocence and bravery - willingness to engage with the landscape
  • Constrained to societal norms that are required of an adult - dignified, adulthood creates distance from the natural world
• Poetic inspiration

  • The poem is ultimately about where he gets inspiration and implies that the deepest inspiration can come from simple memories
  • Title refers to Greek mythology and the poem alludes himself to Narcissus
  • 'Personal' shows how the poem is related to himself, which is an opposite to the classical image of Greek myths
  • Heaney's memories are not idealised but are just as important
  • The poem implies that every poet has their own 'Helicon'
• Exploration and discovery

  • Suggests that the creation of poetry/art is a process of exploration and discovery
  • Allows both the writer and reader to see beyond the poem or work of art into a different world/mind
  • The wells are metaphorical representations of poems and writing poems
  • "I rhyme to see myself, to set the darkness echoing"
  • The speaker suggests that looking into and speaking into the wells helped him find something strange in the familiar, and his own reflection become mysterious and new
  • Writing poetry now gives him this same feeling self-exploration and discovery
  • The speaker writes in order to see what cannot be fully crafted, contained or known
  • By comparing writing to childhood adventures the speaker implies poetry is innocent in the same respect as childhood discoveries - writing poems allows him to retain childhood innocence
• Wells

  • The symbol represents depth (internal depth)
  • Source of vitality as they allow people access to water
  • Metaphorically represent the deep and internal source of Heaney's inspiration and symbolises how essential it is
  • The poem shows wells in the speakers memory and how it was their physical nature the child found most fascinating
  • The wells symbolise the speaker's childhood experience and memory which he can now use as inspiration (like how someone can lower a bucket into a well)
  • Allows the reader to consider what their 'well' is
• Roots

  • "Drag out long roots from the soft mulch" + "pry into roots"
  • Physical meaning of dragging the roots out of the well
  • Symbolically - roots are vital to life and growth, represent origin, symbolise curiosity about the world and a determination to discover
  • Childhood experiences are the 'roots' of his current self and his poetry
  • His work as a poet is to drag out his roots to understand
• Darkness and depth

  • Explores the darkness at the bottom of the well
  • Darkness often symbolises hopelessness, despair, or evil
  • The darkness in the poem represents profound unknowability or infiniteness and suggests the mysteries of the world/himself
  • When the poet rhymes he comes into contact with mystery in the same way when he spoke into the wells as a child he heard his echo transformed
  • The darkness and depth of the well and the earth is suggested to be not something to be feared but rather something to be explored with wonder and curiosity
• Reflections

  • In the poem the child looks into the well to see his own reflection
  • He notes one well was "so deep you saw no reflection in it" and in another he saw a "white face hovered over the bottom"
  • At the end of the poem he states that he "rhyme[s] to see [him]self" which shows how poetry, like water, is a source of reflection
  • Reflections are symbols of self-awareness and self-knowledge
  • The speakers changing reflections represent the speakers growth, transformation, and increasing knowledge
  • The poems reference to Narcissus suggests that from an adult viewpoint, childhood curiosity can be seen as self-indulgent and preoccupied
  • The poem implies true poetry and curiosity goes beyond writing about the self, and looks into deep experiences
• Form (further explanation)

  • 5 quatrains, ABAB rhyme scheme - giving the poem structure and showing how his childhood exploration had an intrinsic sense of balance
  • Each quatrain varies sentence length - emphasises juxtaposition between the shallow container of the well and the long roots that the speaker drags out
  • Contributes to organic nature of poem
  • While there is form it also diverges from this and refuses to be contained/confined - allows the speaker to look beyond the wells