Extended EnglishStudy sites for GCSE and A Level English
Eduqas A Level English Literature ยท Poetry post-1900
Sheers and HeaneyEduqas A Level · Poetry post-1900

Themes across the pairing

What they share, and how they differ

Both poets write from named ground about violence, family and loss, and both distrust landscape that stays mere scenery. The themes below are the bridges an essay can cross. You only need two or three of them in an answer, but you need them held two-way: name the connection, then find the difference inside it, because that difference is where the marks live.

  1. Land and place

    Heaney’s ground holds history; Sheers’s tends to hold a relationship. For Heaney the farm is an ‘invisible, untoppled omphalos’, a sacred centre, and, Andrew Green writes, ‘the earth… becomes the preserver of memory’. For Sheers, landscape and poetry ‘share the same grammar’, and the cloven Skirrid is the shape of every separation in his book.

    Pairings: ‘The Toome Road’ with ‘Skirrid Fawr’; a Glanmore Sonnet with ‘Border Country’.

  2. Violence, war and the Troubles

    Heaney writes from inside a living conflict, mourning men he knew; Sheers looks back at war through history and objects, the bones of Mametz Wood, the photographs behind ‘Happy Accidents’. Where Heaney interrogates ‘our tribe’s complicity’, Sheers lets the dead become ‘a sort of macabre choir’ who ‘can only speak now through the poet’.

    Pairings: ‘In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge’ with ‘Mametz Wood’; ‘Casualty’ with ‘Flag’.

  3. Loss, elegy and grief

    Both transform loss, but not always into consolation. Heaney steadies grief with ritual, washing and plaiting rushes over his cousin in ‘The Strand at Lough Beg’; Sheers often lets it stay raw, or preserves it in a photograph or a scattering of ashes. Test the exam claim that poets ‘transform a sense of loss into something positive’ and you will find both poets sometimes refuse to.

    Pairings: ‘The Strand at Lough Beg’ with ‘The Hill Fort’; ‘The Singer’s House’ with ‘The Steelworks’.

  4. Fathers, sons and family

    Heaney’s father makes the harvest bow, ‘Like a drawn snare’, a craftsman remembered with reverence; Sheers climbs a hill with his ageing father and feels ‘the tipping in the scales of us’ as the generations change places. Both hold family as inheritance, something handed down and owed.

    Pairings: ‘The Harvest Bow’ with ‘Farther’; a Glanmore Sonnet with ‘Inheritance’.

  5. Love, the body and separation

    Heaney’s marriage poems, ‘The Skunk’, ‘The Otter’, the tenth Glanmore Sonnet, are comic and tender, love ‘Stained … to perfection’. Sheers writes love mostly at the point of parting: ‘bodies, like souls, / only exist when touched’. Heaney tends to affirm the covenant; Sheers records its marks after it breaks.

    Pairings: ‘The Skunk’ with ‘Winter Swans’; a Glanmore Sonnet with ‘Valentine’.

  6. Memory and the past

    For both, an object opens the past: a straw bow, a set of keys, a photograph. Heaney reads memory as gratitude and gift, ‘Remember the Giver’; Sheers reads it as ‘the permanent impact of impermanent moments’ (Church). Watch how each moves from a small present thing to a whole vanished life.

    Pairings: ‘A Drink of Water’ with ‘Inheritance’; ‘The Harvest Bow’ with ‘The Hill Fort’.

  7. The poet and the craft

    Both write poems that watch hands work, and think about their own making in doing so. Heaney learns at Glanmore a voice that might ‘continue, hold, dispel, appease’ and offers ‘the end of art is peace’ as fragile hope; Sheers insists ‘trust the poem, not the poet’, and turns a farrier or a sommelier into a figure for the artist’s patience.

    Pairings: ‘Glanmore Sonnets’ with ‘The Farrier’; ‘The Harvest Bow’ with ‘Service’.

A caution about themes

Generalisations like ‘Heaney steadies grief, Sheers leaves it raw’ are starting points to be tested against particular poems, never conclusions to be asserted. The best answers hold the theme lightly and let two poems complicate it.

← Skirrid Hill Context →