Simplicity in Clearances

Seamus Heaney’s series of sonnets, Clearances, are written
as literary monuments to his mother and place amongst his
most celebrated and moving works. The third and fifth poems
in this sequence possess an elegant familiarity that
attracts readers with their clarity and “relatable”
qualities. These are accomplished with clear-cut form,
vocabulary, style, and subject matter. While the third work
uses more rigid, literal separations, and the fifth stresses
a more cyclical, conventional style, Heaney uses
comprehensive and applicable structure and substance in
Clearances 3 and Clearances 5 to increase comprehensibility
to the reader and their appeal to a broad audience in each.
Heaney incorporates a use of evolution in his poems to allow
the reader a definite understanding of the connection
between the order of events occurring and their significance
to the speaker. Clearances 3 is divided into three distinct
sections; the first a stanza ...