Stern
Stern - meaning Summary
Literary Awe Reversed
Seamus Heaney turns a remembered conversation about meeting T. S. Eliot into a picture of literary influence. The speaker first hears Eliot described as an immense presence approaching slowly, then imagines the scene reversed, with himself under Eliot’s gaze. The poem suggests admiration mixed with self-consciousness: the older poet feels large and distant, while the speaker’s own effort to move forward seems slow and uncertain.
Read Complete Analyses‘And what was it like,’ I asked him, ‘Meeting Eliot?’ ‘When he looked at you,’ He said, ‘it was like standing on a quay Watching the prow of the Queen Mary Come towards you, very slowly.’ Now it seems I’m standing on a pierhead watching him All the while watching me as he rows out And a wooden end-stopped stern Labours and shimmers and dips, Making no real headway.
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