Heaney conveys his voice through autobiographical elements, testing the distinction between speaker and poet and blurring the dividing line between his individual sense of identity and the one represented in his poetry. Though the overarching themes of his poetry are tonally apparent without the contextual background of his personal experiences, the need to know the details of his life in order to receive a complete impression of his work draws from the idea that our private self and our public self are separate.
Heaney illustrates this separation of selfhood and public identity by portraying himself as a character in his own work, indicating the complexity of identity in subtle shifts between narrative voices, often not indicating who the speaker is until after the dialogue is presented in the stanza. In section VIII of “Station Island” the lines of direct dialogue dominate the stanzas, infrequently indicating who is speaking. Heaney’s archaeologist cousin is given a large presence in the piece wheras Heaney’s character simply mentions “I could not speak”. The more forgiving criticism of Heaney’s role as a poet merges with Colum’s aggressive accusation. Heaney interjects only slighty, pleading with his cousin before his cousin is given the last word. The prominence of the ghosts voices in this section suggest that this is a inner conflict within Heaney that he is illustrating, personifying certain emotions that are otherwise incommunicable to act out a performance. The use of dialogue supports the drama-like atmosphere that Heaney creates, and the vague shifts between character perspectives insinuates Heaney’s internal struggle. Together, they represent the composite existence of identity as both public performance and inner sentiment. He uses direct dialogue to indicate speech, generating a conversation between himself as a character and the ghosts of his past in a way that imitates banter. Moreover, the immaterial and phantasmal form in which he portrays his friends and family suggests that they represent the pieces of his self that were shaped by their influence. His cousin, Colum, appears “bleeding, pale-faced…plastered in mud” just as he appeared “in Jerpoint the Sunday [he] was murdered.” As a result, he produces an effect that resembles inner conflict and the process of self-identification.
Furthermore, by incorporating unique experiences of love, loss, and guilt, these autobiographical references to personal relationships and individual experience elicit sympathy while highlighting the notion that our private self is communicable only in individual terms, and thus not entirely transferrable from person to person. Heaney uses abstract words that fuse two seemingly unrelated words into one in order to express the inadequacy of language. The lack of an accepted definition to his words imbues his lines with a sense of authenticity, yet the open-endedness of these made-up words also alienate us from his poetry and each other as we are given the liberty to provide our own interpretation of the words. Thus, Heaney utilizes language to demonstrate the tension between the individual and poetry written for the collective.
Heaney demonstrates that poetry is both an expression of the self and a performance. His abstract words and banter with ghosts indicate the difficulty of deciphering the two from each other. and the anxiety that Heaney feels when his sense of self comes in contact with the role of a poet. Through poetry, Heaney expresses the anxiety he feels when his sense of self comes in contact with the public role of the poet, and more importantly, the danger of assuming that performance signifies the wholesome quality of personality.