North

The longship is perhaps the most prominent symbol in Heaney’s “North,” particularly considering that it voices the latter half of the poem. Though the longship is elevated to the level of speaker, it does not lose any of its symbolic valences. Beyond adding to the land and providing a voice of the past, the ship represents migration, violence, and a tomb.

The ship as symbol of migration and of violent raiding parties is rather straight-forward—bringing people to another land is a basic function of this mode of transportation. The ship’s most interesting symbolic resonance is its connection with death and stasis. While these two things may seem to contradict the ship’s other roles, Heaney’s conflation of past and present means that the ship holds onto its symbolic resonances of the past while developing new ones in the present. During the time in which it sailed the seas, it brought “fabulous raiders” and bore witness to “thick-witted couplings and revenges” (Lines 9, 24). As an artifact, however, all of these things are contained within it in an eternal stasis and the ship becomes a tomb like all the other “solid / bell[ies] of stone ships” that contain the dead (Lines 13-14).