the bloodied heads.Goat beards and dogs eyes in a demon packBlazing out of the ground snapping and squealing. (Lines 5-8)In these few lines we are given this image of his cousin now driving down an isolated road. Heaney then bestows us with the gruesome image of these bloodied heads and animals: referring to the story of Sweeney. This new character that Heaney intimated us to, Sweeney, is an Irish king (around 1000AD) who was titled as a madman for savagely killing a saint. The incentive behind the use of Sweeney was to give the reader the idea that this road is dangerous of that something bad is going to happen. Even though the image of “Goat beards and dogs eyes in a demon pack / Blazing out of the ground snapping and Squealing” is quite appalling and startling, Heaney adds this in order to give the reader a feeling of the unreal, world and that what is happening, really shouldn’t be. “Blazing out of the ground snapping and squealing” represents how he thought the killers had approached his cousin: in a surprise and unexpected mode. There is a sense of his whole world being intruded upon.It is now, in the middle of the first stanza, which we know that Seamus Heaney, himself, is not sure of what really happened that night. This is evident by the way he questions what he says is happening.What blazed ahead of you? A faked roadblock?The red lamp swung, the sudden brakes and stallingEngine, voices, heads hooded and the cold nosed gun?Or in your driving mirror tailing headlightsThat pulled out suddenly and flagged you downWhere you weren’t known and far from what you knew. The lowland clays and waters of Lough Beg. Church Island’s spire its soft treeline of yew [Lines 9-16]Here he uses present imagery to describe what happened, and to make it seem more possible. Again, I think, he uses analogies to light to represent the level of safety around his cousin while this was going on. In line ten, he ap...
