“The sea was the river, the river the sea”: The Severn Estuary and the Bristol Channel in Robert Minhinnick and Philip Gross

Abstract

Seamus Heaney’s essay “Something to Write Home About” interlinks a specific political hinterland with the environment, as he ties his geopolitical concerns to depictions of nature. Heaney positions himself as a small child pulled between conflicting currents, ultimately settling on remaining “rooted to the spot midstream” in the Moyola river.1 The Moyola runs from the Sperrin Mountains to Lough Neagh, which acts as an environmental division between the protestant Castledawson and catholic Bellaghy.2 It is this sense of simultaneous geographical and cultural demarcation which concerns Heaney: Nowadays when I think of that child rooted to the spot in midstream, I see a little version of the god the Romans called Terminus, the god of boundaries. The Romans kept an image of Terminus in the Temple of Jupiter on Capitol Hill and the interesting thing is that the roof above the place where the image sat was open to the sky, as if to say that a god of the boundaries and borders of the earth needed to have access to the boundless. [..] And it is that double capacity that we possess as human beings—the capacity to be attracted at one and the same time to the security of what is intimately known and the challenges and entrancements of what is beyond us—it is this double capacity that poetry springs from and addresses. A good poem allows you to have your feet on the ground and your head in the air simultaneously.3