Seamus Heaney: A Voice for the Voiceless

Seamus Heaney: A Voice for the Voiceless

Seamus Heaney brings many perspectives into his writing. As a poet, he reaches into his life experiences and personal history to make us question how we see our world. A recurring theme among the poems in Opened Ground is the role Heaney takes as a voice for the voiceless. We see this reflected in both "Bye-Child" and "Limbo"

In "Bye-Child", Heaney explores the life of what must have been a very lonely child. This child, born of incest, was kept in an outhouse by his mother for fear of repercussion from the child's father. Upon reading of this occurrence, Heaney put himself in the boy's frame of mind. In the first stanza, we see the discovery of the boy by police from his perspective, "The child in the outhouse/Put his eye to a chink-" (Heaney 4-5). From the first visual we are given of the child, we are told something of his personality. He is curious. He has been trapped in the dark for so long and given so little that in the end he seems to be overwhelmed by everything and everybody in the end. And what Heaney alludes to is the spiritual nature of a boy who almost certainly had no spiritual upbringing. As an Irish Catholic, Heaney fixates on the saint-like innocence of a boy who has no voice. In the penultimate stanza:

"How to speak for him?

Vigils, solitudes, fasts,

Unchristened tears,

His puzzled love of the light.

He speaks for me at last" (Heaney 26-30)

By telling us that the boy has fasted and held vigils, Heaney is telling us that this boy has had much spiritual growth even without spiritual direction. The boy whose only contact with the outside world was through chinks in his outhouse has had the solitude to forge a real connection to god. Heaney makes us see that this boy is worthy of our time and efforts. This boy who has had no voice in his life, and has been made to suffer much, is given a voice in the end by Heaney.

Heaney again takes on the voice of a victim in "Limbo". He reflects on the very short life of