Notes on "In Gallarus Oratory"

Provider: Feng-Lin (Ophelia) Chu / 朱鳳蓮

     Gallarus Oratory is an ancient prayer room, built very narrowly and small. People pray in this dark and small place for spiritual exercise. In Heaney’s Preoccupations, he wrote the conflicts between darkness and light; pressure to freedom. For the poet, Gallarus Oratory is a symbolic place of darkness and creativity. The issue of release and suffering repeatedly occur in his writing. The illustration I took from Ireland: The Living Landscape exhibits the enclosed area and the narrow and dark threshold of Gallarus Oratory.

"[Inside, in the dark of the stone, ] I felt the weight of Christianity in all its rebuking aspects, its calls to self-denial and self-abnegation, its humbling of the proud flesh and insolent spirit.  But coming out of the cold heart of the stone, into the sunlight and the dazzle of grass and sea, I felt a lift in my heart, a surge towards happiness that must have been experienced over and over again by those monks as they crossed that same threshold centuries ago.  This surge toward praise, this sudden apprehension of the world as light, as illumination, this is what remains central to our first nature poetry and makes it a unique inheritance." (Preoccupations 189)

　

Heaney, Seamus.  Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1958-1978. London: Faber, 1980.

Ireland : the living landscape
• By: Tom Kelly;  Peter Somerville-Large;  Seamus Heaney.
• Publisher: Schull, West Cork ; Niwot, Colo. : Roberts Rinehart, ©1992.