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English Literature: Modern Poetry Summaries
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PEARSON (PEARSON)
English Literature 2015
Unit 3 - Poetry
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Out of the Bag - Seamus Heaney
STORY OF THE POEM:
- Poem is a rumination on origins and creativity that sets an apparently potent and disturbing
male form against a gentler, but more powerful female one.
- Speaker describes the image of Doctor Kerlin delivering his siblings, with strange symbolism
used with allusions to classical mythology and the truth of healing.
- Home birth’s would’ve been the norm during Heaney’s childhood - routine hospitalisation for
birth is a late 20th century phenomenon.
CONTEXT:
- Hyperborean - In Greek mythology people who lived in perfect existence.
- Poeta Doctus - a truthful poet based on classical models, who marries the art of poetry with
learning.
- Sanctuary of Asklepois at Epidaurus - Asklepois was the Greek God of medicine
- Lourdes - Catholic shrine in France where the faithful go in the hope of a cure.
- Hygieia - Asklepois’ daughter, the goddess of health.
- Thurifer - The person who carried the thurible in Catholic ceremonies, a mental censer
suspended from chains.
THEMES:
- Class - exploration of the class di erences between the working class, Catholic Heaney’s
family and the upper-middle class, Protestant Doctor Kerlin, semantic eld of luxury.
- Gender - Doctor Kerlin could illustrate masculine power, whilst the mother’s pain in delivery
sees insigni cant.
- Motherhood - poem is very personal, tracking the narrator’s childhood and the cyclical feel
that it has by going from births to illness, mother and child relationships are presented.
- Childhood - poem directly relates to childhood through the way in which childhood
understanding and development is depicted, along with transitions away from childhood.
RELEVANCE OF TITLE:
- Title plays on the idiom ‘let the cat out of the bag’, which refers to the revealing of secrets. This
also alludes to the idea that the speaker will nally learn the truth about something signi cant:
the ideas of class, gender, motherhood and creativity.
PART I - KEY QUOTES:
- ‘Kerlin’ , ‘disappear’, ‘reappear’, ‘hypnotist’ - Semantic eld of magic, ‘Kerlin’ alludes to
‘Merlin’ Arthurian legend.
- ‘Those nosy, rosy, big soft hands of his’ - Assonance of ‘O’ could be indicating the child’s
mouth gaping in awe. Hand imagery suggests purity and absence of scarring, expected of a
middle class man. Internal rhyme in tangent with ‘nosy’ implies the idea of doctor being
invasive. ‘Soft’ refers to sense of familiarity and paints doctor in positive light.
- ‘The trap-sprung mouth unsnibbed and gaping wide’ - personi cation of bag, somewhat
demonic and sinister to a child who doesn’t understand, sense of ambiguity.
- ‘Wide’, ‘unwinding’, ‘wind’, ‘lining’, ‘like’ - assonance of ‘I’, re ects the Childs curiosity and
hypnotic way doctor cleans his instruments. Doctor simultaneously represents familiarity and
the unknown to the child.
- ‘Darken the door and leave’ - sinister imagery, colloquial phrase used with negative
connotations in reference to someone who is unwelcome.
1
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