Out of the Bag - Seamus Heaney

Overview

• speaker, the adult Heaney, recalls scenes from his boyhood, particularly the local doctor's periodic visits to his family's home.

• To the young Heaney, Doctor Kerlin is an impressive figure, and even a little frightening—because Heaney believes he's literally "delivering" new babies that he's assembled in a workshop!

• This childhood misunderstanding sparks an extended meditation on innocence, imagination, faith, and healing.

• Weaving together myth and memory, Heaney dreamily recounts visits to the religious shrines at Lourdes and Epidaurus—but keeps returning, in memory, to the plain little bedroom where he and his siblings were born

Themes

• childhood

• innocence

• imagination

• birth and life

• memory

• past

• myth

• religion

• medicine

Form and Structure

1st person

• cyclical nature = begins and ends in the same setting—the room the speaker came from—suggesting a return to origins and the continuous nature of time, life, and memory.

• enjambment = allows the lines to flow into one another, mimicking the associative nature of memory and the free-flowing thoughts of the speaker. 

Rhyme and Meter

free verse

Title

The title 'Out of the Bag' suggests something being revealed or something being born - links to how the child thinks that the babies come out of the doctor's bag (stork story)