Wheels Within Wheels by Seamus Heaney

689 Words3 Pages
In his poem Heaney presents various memories from the persona’s (which most certainly is Heaney) childhood. We are, right from the beginning lead into various situations where the persona, as a child, is playing and experimenting with different things, like children do, in order to develop and learn. He does things such as pedaling his with his hands and chucking objects into the spinning wheels resulting in it spraying in his face. The whole poem is filled with other examples of ‘childish’ things which the young boy performs with curiosity and enthusiasm. We have the events “If you touched it with a straw, the straw frittered” and “To the water’s surface, then turned the pedals” which both show how the boy tries new things to find out what will happen. He presses the straw into the wheel and he goes down to the muddy well with his bike, although his mother probably told him not to, because he is curious and inquisitive. He just has to find out what will happen in the different occasions. These events make the poem interesting and might even trigger the reader to think back to their own childhood and their own memories. These are actions that we probably recognize from our own childhood. We might not be able to identify with these exact proceedings, with the dirt and mud, but other things that we did which fascinated us, maybe just because they where off limit and taboo. It can be argued that the boy is courageous in some extraordinary way. One might look up to him and envy his indifference to consequences. He doesn’t care if the mud and dirt sprays over him nor does he care if he is covered in ‘potato juice’. He is not even put of by the smell of dung. The other way around, the boy actually seems to like it. These examples are expressed in the lines “Spun mush and drizzle back into your face” and “I loved the turbid smell”. The boy is wonderfully unaware of all
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