The Spirit Level
Upend a dried cactus stalk packed with seeds and a downpour starts inside the room; from that small trick the book moves out to the watchman on the roof at Mycenae, sick with ten years of keeping his mouth shut while the king was away at Troy. Other poems settle old scores and then refuse to, a swing pushed in a farmyard, a beam levelled. Written in the two years after the first ceasefire, and given the Whitbread in the season Heaney took the Nobel.
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Lineage
- responds to ↑ The Oresteia
Attributes
Plot structure
Symbol / motif
Conflict
Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
- 64% · 13 shared
- 61% · 12 shared
- 58% · 10 shared
- 58% · 10 shared
- 55% · 12 shared
- 55% · 12 shared