STANCA NICOLETA - Door into the Dark: Images of Darkness and Light in Seamus Heaney’s Writings
(pag. 107-121)
The paper points to darkness and light as a classical dual pair, which figures prominently in Heaney’s poetic vision. The two series of images are seen in a constant relationship of tension, secondary-primary positioning being undermined. We have explored darkness and light in relation to Heaney’s ars poetica, the Irish troubles and the poet’s self. The chapter concludes that the dualities of content and poetic strategies, discussed in the previous chapters, are reflected in the structuring of Heaney’s poetic imagery as well. They may account for the undecidability of the self, for the so-called écriture feminine, to use H. Cixous’s words to refer to the kind of writing that does not depend on sex but on the perception of the text by the reader because it operates at syntactic and semantic level; it is any kind of writing containing repressed or veiled elements, vocabulary leading to ambiguity and resisting direct access to unity, light and truth.