The Barn
Seamus Heaney * Track #3 On The Northern Muse
Download "The Barn"
The Barn by Seamus Heaney
Performed by
Seamus HeaneyAbout
In this poem Heaney looks back to his childhood and the fear he felt when he entered the barn. It is a vivid memory that affected him profoundly, so that he remembered it years later when an adult. For comparison it can be compared with Wordsworth’s Extract from the Prelude and another Heaney poem...
The Barn Annotated
Threshed corn lay piled like grit of ivory
Or solid as cement in two-lugged sacks.
The musky dark hoarded an armoury
Of farmyard implements, harness, plough-socks.
The floor was mouse-grey, smooth, chilly concrete.
There were no windows, just two narrow shafts
Of gilded motes, crossing, from air-holes slit
High in each gable. The one door meant no draughts
All summer when the zinc burned like an oven.
A scythe's edge, a clean spade, a pitchfork's prongs:
Slowly bright objects formed when you went in.
Then you felt cobwebs clogging up your lungs
And scuttled fast into the sunlit yard-
And into nights when bats were on the wing
Over the rafters of sleep, where bright eyes stared
From piles of grain in corners, fierce, unblinking.
The dark gulfed like a roof-space. I was chaff
To be pecked up when birds shot through the air-
slits.
I lay face-down to shun the fear above.
The two-lugged sacks moved in like great blind rats