ABSTRACT
The grammatical term 'middle voice' adapted is an eminently suitable expression of the problem of linguistic and social affiliation. The full calculated complexity of its form is now plain. When it appeared, the roughness of its form, in a stanza whose hallmark is its metrical virtuosity, was thought puzzling. In philological terms, of course, 'middle voice' applies more properly in grammar than in vocabulary. Heaney comes close to the strict grammatical sense of the term 'middle voice' in Greek, to mean reciprocal or reflexive. But in Part Three of Station Island Yeats is an important presence again, particularly in the group of rather animist tree-poems with which it opens. In three consecutive poems Heaney pays tribute to the master in poems which link, as Yeats does, bird, poet and tree. If people had to name a single theme as central in it, it would be not the afterlife but nostalgia and loss.
