An elegy, a love song, and a lullaby

In the course of the past decade, I have found himself looking as much to p oets and the experience of reading poetry as to the work of other analysts in my ongoing effort to become a psychoanalyst. Both the poet and the psych oanalyst are individuals whose life's work is that of making "raid[s] [on] the inarticulate" (Eliot, 1940, p. 128) in their effort to delve as deeply as possible into what it is to be human and to render that experience in th e medium of language. To this end, I offer a reading of Seamus Heaney's (19 87) "Clearances," an elegy Heaney wrote for his mother soon after her death . I explore the ways in which the experience of mourning-whether in a poem or in an analytic experience-is not simply "conveyed" (as if illuminating s omething already there) but created in the very act of writing/saying the p oem or of bringing feelings to life in words in an analytic session. I begin by presenting a brief biographical account of Heaney not to "explai n" his poetry in analytic terms but to allow the reader to create a more im aginative, more human reading of the poem as he or she enters into the conv ersation between the life of the man and the life of the poetry. Then I dis cuss the ways in which "Clearances" comes to life as a variety of coexistin g forms of love that together shape an experience of grief.