Converting to Things Foreknown: Heaney’s Marvelous Imagination in “Station Island”

This essay explores Seamus Heaney’s “Station Island” series in its procession of visions during a pilgrimage to the island of Lough Derg. I argue that Heaney works out in this series a picture of the meeting of worlds, of the worldliness of the present and the in-breaking of the otherworldly, and in this poem we see the “deep Catholicism” of Heaney’s redemptive, cathartic poetry. This feature is important to understanding the significance of Heaney’s marriage of the sacred and secular; these poems, examined in the context of Heaney’s larger vision, show the evolution of Heaney’s poetry and put forth the possibility of a poetry that can work as purgation