shooters scared him as a grown war reflected either how bad the war was (that every loud nose disturbed him and just reminded him of what was going on) or that he was so innocuous, like a child, that he couldn’t make sense of what was happening around him. In this case, the reason behind his fear is combination of both these possibilities. I think that when Colum sees these cartridges of bullets he was get reminded of what was happening around him and showed that he feared war: he was anti-war. For you and yours and yours and mine fought shy, Spoke an old language of conspiratorsAnd could not crack the whip or seize the day: Big voiced scullions, herders, feelers roundHaycocks and hindquarters, talkers in byres. Slow arbitrators of the burial groundThese few lines support the idea of him being innocent because he was a shy and timid person, not aggressive. He lived on a farm and was simple, he was not like the rest of the people who were always stressed about the problems they may have had; he was more laid back and satisfied. This stanza was to show how Colum McCartney didn’t fit into the war picture and gave more reason towards how unnecessary his death was because he was neutral and wanted nothing to do with that war scene.In the third, and last stanza of the poem Seamus Heaney now brings into the poem, his own imagination and thoughts. He tells us the way he believes a person should be buried and what the experience of his cousin’s death was like for him.“Across that strand of yours the cattle grazeUp to their bellies in an early mistAnd now they turn their unbewildered gazeTo where we work our way through speaking sedgeThe beginning of the third stanza suggests that it might be a continuation of the second because it describes, still, the environment that Colum lived in. I think that it was important that Heaney uses the farm animal the cow, in this poem. Out of all farm animals, cows would be most like th...
