Anahorish
Anahorish - meaning Summary
Place Name as Memory
Heaney turns the Irish place-name Anahorish, glossed as "place of clear water," into a meditation on memory and belonging. The poem evokes the hill, lane, grass, mist, and wells of a rural landscape, then links those details to the sound of the name itself. It presents place as something both physically real and imaginatively recovered through language.
Read Complete AnalysesMy ‘place of clear water’, the first hill in the world where springs washed into the shiny grass and darkened cobbles in the bed of the lane. Anahorish, soft gradient of consonant, vowel-meadow, after-image of lamps swung through the yards on winter evenings. With pails and barrows those mound-dwellers go waist-deep in mist to break the light ice at wells and dunghills.
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