Book is x + 52 pp. "Holding Course," a poem of 20 lines in 4 stanzas, is one of several poems in The Haw Lantern (others are the consecutive group "From the Land of the Unspoken," "A Ship of Death," and "The Spoonbait") that reflect Heaney's close creative engagement with Beowulf. The third stanza of "Holding Course" uses the image of Grendel's claw displayed in Heorot as part of a larger theme of perseverance and risk.

The poem begins:

Propellers underwater, cabins drumming, lights—
Unthought-of but constant out there every night,
The big ferries pondered on their courses. (41)

And ends:

As gulls cry out above the deep channels
And you stand on and on, twiddling your hair,
Think of me as your MacWhirr of the boudoir,
Head on, one track, ignorant of manoeuvre. (41)

• 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.