Book is x + 52 pp. "The Spoonbait," a poem of 14 lines in 7 couplets, is part of a group of consecutive poems in The Haw Lantern ("From the Land of the Unspoken," "A Ship of Death," and "The Spoonbait") that reflect Heaney's close creative engagement with Beowulf. The 6th couplet shares language and imagery with the scene of Scyld's funeral as represented in "A Ship of Death."

The poem begins:

So a new similitude is given us
And we say: The soul may be compared

Unto a spoonbait that a child discovers (21)

And ends:

Then exit, the polished helmet of a hero
Laid out amidships above scudding water.

Exit, alternatively, a toy of light
Reeled through him upstream, snagging on nothing. (21)

• Floyd Collins, Seamus Heaney: The Crisis of Identity (University of Delaware Press, 2003), 162.

• Chris Jones, Strange Likeness: The Use of Old English in Twentieth-Century Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), chap. 4, "Old English Escape Routes: Seamus Heaney—The Caedmon of the North," esp. p. 226.

Not in MO2.

BAM (from 1st U.S. edition, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1987).