“Body And Soul Apart”: Sense of Death In Seamus Heaney’s Human Chain

Abstract

Heaney’s Human Chain delves deeply into themes of mortality, presence, and absence, making it an excellent text for exploring the sense of death through hermeneutic analysis. Seamus Heaney (1939- 2013) is considered the best poet after W. B. Yeats, and his esteemed reputation among English writers makes his poetry well-known among readers and critics. After a long journey and a lot of experience Heaney gained from the troubles that faced Ireland and what came after, he reached his final step in the Human Chain. Going through the twelve collections of poetry that he wrote, from Death of Naturalist 1966 to his final collection, Human Chain 2010, Heaney explores a variety of themes that are related to his past and present. This article will investigate the concept of death in this volume by selecting the related two poems “Had I not been awake” and “Chanson d’Aventure”. This study applies a hermeneutic textual analysis methodology to analyze the selected poems. The objective of this study is to analyze the two poems and thus find the core of self that the poet reached in this volume of poetry, accepting the idea of death in the final steps of his life.