Shancoduff
Shancoduff - meaning Summary
Rural Landscape and Identity
The poem presents a speaker’s intimate, ambivalent relationship with bleak rural hills. The landscape is both lifeline and stubbornly barren: it resists sunlight yet shelters everyday labors and memories of hardship. Local observers shrug that a poet tied to such land must be poor, and the speaker feels the sting of that judgment. The voice mixes pride in a rooted place with a questioning, uneasy awareness of social and material limits.
Read Complete AnalysesMy black hills have never seen the sun rising, Eternally they look north towards Armagh. Lot's wife would not be salt if she had been Incurious as my black hills that are happy When dawn whitens Glassdrummond chapel. My hills hoard the bright shillings of March While the sun searches in every pocket. They are my Alps and I have climbed the Matterhorn With a sheaf of hay for three perishing calves In the field under the Big Forth of Rocksavage. The sleety winds fondle the rushy beards of Shancoduff While the cattle-drovers sheltering in the Featherna Bush Look up and say: ‘Who owns them hungry hills That the water-hen and snipe must have forsaken? A poet? Then by heavens he must be poor.' I hear and is my heart not badly shaken?
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