unkindled

An old, inherited bed becomes a ship: "If I lie in it, I am cribbed in seasoned deal/ Dry as the unkindled boards of a funeral ship." Later in the poem he declares that "whatever is given/ Can always be reimagined, however four-square,/ Plank-thick, hull-stupid and out of its time/ It happens to be." Seamus Heaney's mission is to resolve dualities, to find a middle voice between opposites, between homespun and cosmopolitan, and, on the cultural front, between the stridencies of Protestant and Catholic, Unionist and Nationalist.

It is not satisfied till we all come to a perfect man; it knows that the sweetness and light of the few must be imperfect until the raw and the unkindled masses of humanity are touched with sweetness and light...." (5:112)