ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the metaphor of conversations at the frontier of dreaming to convey—along with a great many other meanings—a sense of the way conscious and unconscious feelings give shape to language, and language gives shape to feelings. It considers the experiences of grieving as they are brought to life freshly, delicately, and unexpectedly in "Clearances", a poem Seamus Heaney wrote for his mother soon after her death. The poem "Clearances", seems to be at once an elegy, a love song, and a lullaby. The chapter offers a brief narrative of Heaney's life as a context for reading his poem. Heaney's life as an adolescent became further disjointed and disconnected from itself when he was awarded a government grant to attend a private Catholic boarding school. "Clearances", written in 1984, the year of the death of Heaney's mother, consists of a dedication, an epigraph poem, and eight sonnets.
