ANALYSE ELEGY FOR A STILLBORN CHILD

This beautiful poem by Seamus Heaney is, as the title indicates, an elegy, a poem of lament. Traditionally, an elegy contains three sections: an expression of grief, an expression of praise for the dead, and then an offering of solace in the conclusion. Heaney's poem adheres to this, broken down as it is by the poet into three numbered sections. Part 1 laments how the "collapsed sphere" of the stillborn child "extinguished itself in our atmosphere." Part 2 expresses what the child achieved in its short life, functioning as a "cartographer" to chart its father's path "from husband towards father." Part 3, the conclusion, offers an element of reflection as consolation, the final image of the poet "on lonely journeys" and the world "full to the brim with cloud" suggesting that the journey of life continues on toward unknown new horizons.
Heaney makes the decision to address the poem directly to its subject, the unborn child: "you." This underlines for the reader the fact that the child is, though unborn, a person with a soul, who existed, even if only in its mother's womb. This forms an interesting contrast with the description of the child as a "weight of seed-flesh and bone-curd," as others might view it.
This contrast is in line with Heaney's use of opposites throughout the poem, which is, after all, on the seemingly opposite themes of birth and death, both combined in the body of this stillborn child and its emergence into the world. The baby's mother is "heavy with the lightness in her," and the "globe" the father imagined is shattered when "the pole fell, shooting star, into the ground."
The imagery used in the poem could be interpreted as nautical. A simile compares the baby's mother to "an empty creel" (a creel is a wicker basket usually used to hold fish). Meanwhile, the "intimate nudge and pull" of the baby inside her suggests the nudge and pull of guide ropes on a boat. In the second section of the poem, the baby becomes a metaphorical "cartographer," or map maker, charting a father's journey like an explorer; the trappings of exploration, such as the "globe" and the "pole" (which suggests a pole star or guiding star) also feature in this stanza. The child, in its "six months" of life, seemed a guiding star through previously uncharted waters for these parents, until it fell away, leaving them untethered. The "collapsed sphere" metaphor in the first stanza, too, suggests a star which "extinguished itself in our atmosphere."
The final section of the poem is distinct from the others in that the heavy use of figurative language falls away, demarcating this as the passage of consolation and reflection. The images in this section, as the poet contemplates "birth of death, exhumation for burial," are evocative, but literal: "a wreath of small clothes, a memorial pram." The poet marks, in this stanza, a return to the real world, much as the baby's parents must also return to real life eventually. The image of the "bare road" on which the poet is driving is not prepossessing at the moment—"under a drizzling sky, a circling rock"—but we see promise in the "mountain fields" and the "white waves riding home on a wintry lough." The poem ends on a note not only of reflection, but also of assurance that life will go on, and there may yet be a new "cartographer" to chart the journey.