Book is x + 52 pp. "From the Land of the Unspoken," a poem of 32 lines in 4 stanzas, 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 second stanza is strongly reminiscent of Beowulf's scenes of Scyld's arrival on Danish shores and his funeral.

The poem begins:

I have heard of a bar of platinum
kept by a logical and talkative nation
as their standard of measurement,
the throne room and the burial chamber
of every calculation and prediction. (18)

And ends:

Meanwhile, if we miss the sight of a fish
we heard jumping and then see its ripples,
that means one more of us is dying somewhere. (19)

• 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. pp. 226–27.

BAM.