셰이머스 히니의 전체 시는 고향 떠남, 방황 그리고 귀향이라는 삼부 구조로 구성되어있다. 그의 초기 시집 『자연주의자의 죽음』부터 『북 쪽』은 북 아일랜드를 떠나기에 앞서 북 아일랜드 사태가 초래한 시인의 정신적 갈등을 다룬 작품들이다. 이들 중 특히 『어둠의 문』에서 작가는 자유를 향한 변신의 몸짓으로 자신과 자신이 속한 공동체의 새로운 모습을 모색하면서 자신이 순수 시인이 되어야 할지 아니면 참여 시인이 되어야하는 지에 대한 갈등을 표현한다. 그리고 『북 쪽』은 북 아일랜드 사태의 근원과 그 해결법을 추구하면서도 이 사태로부터 탈출해야 할 것인가 아닌가의 갈등 그리고 떠나갈 것을 결정하기까지의 작가의 내적 여정을 그린 작품이다

셰이머스 히니는 여러 비평적 산문을 통해 시와 시인에 대한 자신의 관점을 드러내고 있다. 그에 따르면 시는 복잡다단한 현실에 목소리를 부여하여 결국 다른 어떤 것으로도 규명할 수 없는 현실의 복잡한 실체를 드러낸다. 그리고 그 과정에서 시인은 언어가 지닌 다중적인 의미 전달의 특성을 통해 결코 단순화할 수 없는 현실의 내면을 진실에 가깝게 제시한다. 특히 히니는 자연과 인간이 맺는 상호 관련성을 자신의 시의 주요한 틀로 삼는데, 이를 통해 시인은 자연의 생명력을 고취시키는 존재임을 암시한다. 시와 시인에 대한 그의 관점은 점점 더 실용성과 경제성을 강조하는 요즘의 풍토에서 시의 대사회적 역할을 제시하는 한편, 예술로서의 존재성을 강조하여 시와 시인에 대한 본래적 의미를 성찰하게 한다.

북아일랜드의 민족주의 시인으로 알려진 셰이머스 히니는 「산사나무 등」과 「사물의 응시」에서 보편성을 향한 새로운 시적 정체성 찾기의 출발을 예고한다. 히니의 이러한 시도는 「산사나무 등」에서는 자기 성찰과 북아일랜드의 우화적 재현과 같은 객관화 전략으로 드러난다. 또한 「사물의 응시」에서는 경계라는 이미지를 이용하여 북아일랜드의 상황을 고정된 하나의 관점이 아닌 다층적인 관점으로 응시할 것을 이야기한다. 이러한 노력을 통해 히니는 지역주의를 극복하고 보편성에 접근하고자 한다.

Yeats and Keats differently introduced their notions of time circulation and eternal life. One expressed limitations of human which could be overcome by art. And the other introduced time flowing in harmony and peace. And in one poem, we can see something lively such as young people, birds, trees, salmon-falls, and in the other poem we can find laziness and leisure. However, there is some similarity in that they introduce the subjects of circulation of life and eternal life. Yeats shows the passage of time by the Great Wheel or gyre which develops in the course of formation, fullness, decline. And Keats also presents the passage of time by using the phrases such as “swell the gourd,” “plum the hazel shell,” “warm day will never cease.” These symbolize swelling and continuance of time. So we can find the way how time is flowing in their poems. In Yeats's “Sailing to Byzantium,” time travels from a youth to an old age, and in “To Autumn,” time travels from summer to autumn. In this circulation Yeats's immortality can be reached by the media of art. And Keats gets it by the circulation of seasons. So one continues to voyage with eagerness for Byzantium in which he could find his everlasting life through the mosaic of 15th century, and the other comfortably waits for next seasons. Two poets respectively develop their poems in different ways, but they finally achieve the same subjects of ever-lasting life in the passage of time. In conclusion, Yeats pursued immortality by separating spirit from the body, because the flesh would be decayed. On the other hand, Keats thought that the immortality could be acquired by being one with time. Unlike Yeats's “Sailing to Byzantium”, Keats's “To Autumn” has a tendency to keep harmony and reconciliation, instead of confrontation. Therefore, autumn enjoys “sitting,” and “asleep” without haste.

Seamus Heaney’s “Station Island” has been viewed as a psychological drama in which Heaney explores alter-egos that he might have become. Such an approach becomes more complicated if we consider that the stage of the drama is Ricoeurian typology of mnemonic phenomena where the narrator “I” is splitted into the subject in the process of recollection and the self fixed in the pure memory. According to Paul Ricoeur, the epistemological process of recollection involves the evocation of past memories at the present moment, so that the subject-in-recollection imagines the self fixed in the pure memory to be “the other than self” and relives past memories as if real. In this sense, Ricoeur argues that memory exists in the typology of mnemonic phenomena as memory-images and that the subject-in-recollection tend to imagine the past in the way he can satisfy his desire. Likewise, in “Station Island” Heaney’s narrator “I” re-imagines his past memories as if they were memory-images and re-lives past feelings as “the other than self.” By becoming “the other than self” in the process of recollection, he reviews the burden of a national poet and finally accepts the limitation of his fellow Irish people as well as his own self. For Heaney, accepting the limitations and scars as they are becomes the foundation for love, friendship, and goodness toward his people because it lets him realize reasons for the necessity of co-dependency and reciprocity.

Motivated with the poetic utterance that "all this is signified by their language" as Heaney's own word, this essay shows that Seamus Heaney, not just by resisting past colonial domination with a decolonial literary system, has successively served for playing the colonial language in his poetic representation and finally achieved the poetic autonomy. Under and after the colonial experience, Most of Irish poets have continually struggled against English political system and its language as a colonial one. But Heaney has consistently defended poetry as agent for redressing injustices in the corrupt world and at the same time as something to be re-established and celebrated in his own right. The process of Haney's quest for playing colonial language of his Irish identity as a poet can be effectively understood by examining the way in which he employs the poetic of redress. The main subject of Heaney's poetry is to find out his Irish identification with the past linguistic tradition and its continuity. The subject is linked with the questioning of how to turn to playing the colonial language between English language and Irish language so called Gaelic which has been dominated by the ideology of colonialism. The major focus of this essay is in his redress of poetic language and playing colonial language as well as how he appropriate language in his poetry. In this regard, This essay tries to search for the true linguistic attitude which Heaney has made every effort to materialize in his poetry. In short, Heaney's poetics can help his writings maintain the positionality of the decolonial dicourse and the decolonial literature.

In my article titled “Nationalism of William B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney in their early poetry: mythic nationalism and realistic national consciousness” which was published in The Journal of English Language & Literature Vol. 45 No. 3, I analyzed three among four factors of nationalism (implicated) in the two poets’ early poetry, that is, ethnicity, language, territory. This article deals with one remaining factor of nationalism, religion, in their middle poetry. Religion is so powerful an influence in Ireland that Irish nationalism can be considered Irish Catholic Nationalism. The political, religious, and economic conflicts between Anglo-Irish Protestants and Catholic Irish made Ireland divided into Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland, after Ireland was liberated from British imperialism in 1922. The native Irish who had lost even their mother tongue, Gaelic during the colonial period of almost 800 years ruled by the British Empire sought their national identity in Catholicism and made the religious oppression of Britain their centripetal force. To Yeats, religion was not a dogmatic faith of institutionalized religion but a field in which his imagination of the supernatural is allowed full play to go beyond the ephemeral real world to the eternal spiritual world. He set the Irish religious identity on Irish countrymen’s native faith in faerie, ghost, eternity of soul, and the world of magic expressed in Irish legends, folklore, myths, and oral traditions. He satisfied his hunger for the ultimate truth of universe with the Irish ancient faith in the mystical world of the everlasting soul and the visionary as well as various kinds of mysticism in the East and the West. The mystical religious identity of the native Irish emphasized by him anticipated the continuous collisions among him, the Catholic pulpit and Irish nationalists. His romantic belief in a heroic spiritual Ireland materialized his Irish Literary Movement and his idealized Anglo-Irish Ascendancy culture was far from the political nationalism of the middle class of Ireland, the political class of the people democracy. Seamus Heaney has also suffered from the conflict between his cultural․ political ideals which are fundamentally Ireland-centered and the political reality of the violent IRA (Irish Republican Army) which kills even civilians at random for the cause of nationalism. To Heaney the religious faith was a recognition of the deep value of the religious ritual and the Catholic ritual has been internalized in his feminine poetic sensibility of patience, humility, duty, discipline, guiltiness, grace, wonder, and the ritual supplication. The Irish religious identity he put an emphasis on was not the visionary mystic one of Yeats but the real one which has been internalized in the minds of the native Catholic Irish as “self-afflicting compulsions” and spiritual paralysis, especially in terms of political martyrdom complex in IRA and historical defeatism of Catholic priests in Northern Ireland. Both Heaney and Yeats opposed violence of nationalism and sought their ideal one. Religion has had a devastating influence on the two tribal struggle in Ireland so that the two poets refused the established Christianity and tried to enhance Irish republican nationalism to the genuine nationalism allowing the peaceful co-existence of the two races living in Ireland. Heaney demythodized Yeats’s myth of the political martyrdom and denied the religious halo of Irish nationalism as well as the mythodized force in the history of the Northern Europe. His quest of democratic co-existence of plural culture in Ulster seems realistic and idealistic solution of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.