The Barn
Threshed corn lay piled like grit of ivory
Or solid as cement in two-lugged sacks.
The musky dark hoarded an armoury
Of farmyard implements, harness, plough-socks.
The floor was mouse-grey, smooth, chilly concrete.
There were no windows, just two narrow shafts
Of gilded motes, crossing, from air-holes slit
High in each gable. The one door meant no draughts
All summer when the zinc burned like an oven.
A scythe's edge, a clean spade, a pitchfork's prongs:
Slowly bright objects formed when you went in.
Then you felt cobwebs clogging up your lungs
And scuttled fast into the sunlit yard-
And into nights when bats were on the wing
Over the rafters of sleep, where bright eyes stared
From piles of grain in corners, fierce, unblinking.
The dark gulfed like a roof-space. I was chaff
To be pecked up when birds shot through the air-
slits.
I lay face-down to shun the fear above.
The two-lugged sacks moved in like great blind rats.
Seamus Heaney
Structure and Form
Comparative Ideas
• He describes what he sees (‘threshed corn’) using a simile to show its fineness,
‘grit’, and colour ‘ivory’. Its heaviness he expresses in ‘solid as cement’, an
assonant simile which introduces an image which he uses in the powerful terrifying
conclusion, ‘two lugged sacks’. We are used to plastic or pressed paper sacks but
these would be knotted so that the top corners stood up like ‘lugs’, ears. He can
smell the dark (‘musty’) and he personifies it as hoarding all the old tools of the
now mechanised farm of the 1940s and 1950s. He uses a military metaphor
(‘armoury’) to refer to the ploughing implements.
• He uses colour (‘mouse-grey’), touch (‘smooth’) and alliteration (‘chilly concrete’)
to describe the unwelcoming barn floor. The lack of windows adds to the
atmosphere, though in a contrasting beautiful image he remembers the dust as
‘gilded’, touched by gold by the sunlight from the high narrow slits – note the
adjectives. Only one door implies a feeling of being trapped, but in a run-on line it
also meant ‘no draughts’ so that the summer’s heat made sure the roof ‘burned like
an oven’, a powerful simile.
• But in the darkness he could see ‘ bright objects’ which took shape (‘formed’) as
his eyes adjusted. These are farm hand tools, a scythe, a spade, a pitch-fork, though
there is menace in the sharp nouns ‘edge’ and ‘prongs’. He uses the pronoun ‘you’
as though to invite us to share his memory or to put the fear he felt at the remove by
avoiding ‘I’. The word ‘then’ signals the limits of his endurance; he escapes, but as
yet he has described nothing terrifying. He uses alliteration and hyperbole in a
striking metaphor ‘cobwebs clogging up your lungs’ to express his inability to
breathe in an atmosphere he found claustrophobic.
• He uses the colloquialism ‘scuttled’ to describe his ‘fast’ undignified rush to reach
the yard which is ‘sunlit’ in contrast to the barn. It was in nightmares that the barn
had the power to terrify him. Just as the bats must have flown at night in the rafters
of the barn so they fly through his troubled sleep and in the nightmare barn ‘bright
eyes stared’. Though he does not say here to what the eyes belonged, Heaney as a
child feared rats. The adjectives ‘fierce’ and ‘unblinking’ add to the sense of
menace he felt.
• In the final verse he describes how the dark ‘gulfed’, using the noun ‘gulf’ as a verb
to express how overwhelmingly huge the darkness felt to the boy he used to be.
The simile ‘like a roof-space’ emphasised this and reminds us of the barn which
caused these awful dreams. Suddenly he uses ‘I’ as though the memory intensifies
and uses a metaphor – himself as ‘chaff’, the corn husks left after threshing, at the
mercy of the birds which ‘shot through the air-slits’ (he must have seen birds do
this often in the real barn). To avoid this air-borne terror he ‘lay face-down’ to
‘shun’, avoid and escape that ‘fear’. The last line provides a powerful climax – in
his nightmare the innocent sacks of the first verse become part of his morbid fear of
rats and they ‘moved in like great blind rats’. The final simile uses two adjectives
to express their size and sightlessness which does not prevent them from moving in,
no doubt, for the kill.
• The poem is full of telling detail acutely observed and a variety of images to
express how he felt in the barn and how those feelings combined with his terror of
rats became the awful substance of his nightmares as a child.
• Note how Heaney runs on verses two and three (enjambement) and the change from
‘you’ to the much more powerful ‘I’ as the memory takes hold.
• Five verses, each of four lines. The lines part-rhyme alternately and each line has
the same number of syllables, ten.
• Compare Heaney’s fear with Sylvia Plath’s fear of old age as she expresses it in
Mirror. In that poem it is a thing – a mirror that embodies her worst nightmare the
terrible fish of old age. Then you might look at Warning – no fear there, just
joyous anticipation and a desire to shock!