Comparative Analyses
Detailed poem-to-poem comparative analyses of Heaney's Field Work with Sheers' Skirrid Hill. AO4 (comparison) is 10 marks — integrate comparison throughout every essay paragraph.
Comparative Paragraph Structure (PEEL + Comparison)
Point
Comparative claim about both
Evidence
Quotation from Heaney
Explain
Analyse technique/effect
Evidence
Quotation from Sheers
Explain
Analyse technique/effect
Compare
Explicit comparison
Key Comparative Analyses
Both poems explore the father-son relationship through a shared physical act in a rural setting — Heaney's father plaiting a harvest bow, Sheers and his father climbing Skirrid Hill. Both use a specific, tangible object or event as the vehicle for what cannot easily be said between men. Both are poems of inheritance and anticipated or achieved loss. Yet they differ profoundly in emotional register: Heaney writes from retrospective tenderness after his father's death, while Sheers writes from within the anxiety of a relationship still being negotiated.
Masculinity: Inherited craft vs. inherited silence
Both poems interrogate what fathers transmit to sons, and both find that the most significant inheritance is non-verbal. In The Harvest Bow, Heaney observes his father's hands as they plait straw — 'hands that aged round ash plants and cane sticks' — rendering masculine competence through accumulated physical detail. The verb phrase 'aged round' suggests the body shaped by labour, the hands moulded by the tools they habitually carry; masculinity here is something grown into slowly, inscribed on the body rather than consciously taught. The adjective 'aged' carries both time and dignity, positioning the father's craft as the product of a lifetime's patient practice. In Farther, Sheers similarly observes his father through physical detail, but what he notices is effort and vulnerability rather than mastery: 'your bent head the colour of the rocks, / your breath reaching me, short and sharp and solitary.' The father is labouring up a steep hill, his breath 'short and sharp' — the asyndeton of the three adjectives enacting the staccato rhythm of breathlessness. Where Heaney's father's hands are authoritative and 'aged' into competence, Sheers' father is fragile, 'solitary' even in his son's presence. Both poets render masculinity through the body in physical effort, but Heaney finds craft and dignity where Sheers finds fragility and the first intimations of mortality.
Love / Domesticity: Tenderness encoded in action
Both poems are love poems to fathers — poems about the difficulty of expressing filial love between men who do not speak it directly. Heaney captures this through the harvest bow itself, describing it as 'a throwaway love-knot of straw' — the oxymoronic phrase is the poem's emotional core: 'throwaway' implies casualness, disposability, the bow made without ceremony; 'love-knot' reveals what it actually is, an act of love encoded in craft. Father and son never articulate what the bow means — the love is in the making, tacit and complete. Sheers captures the same dynamic through the act of photography: the speaker places a camera on the trig point and leans his 'cheek against the stone' to find his father in the frame — an act of self-effacement in which he removes himself from behind the lens in order to stand beside his father in the photograph. The physical detail of cheek against cold stone is quietly tender, discomfort accepted in order to 'catch' the moment. Both fathers and sons communicate love through objects and actions rather than words — Heaney's through the made thing, Sheers' through the photograph. Yet where Heaney's father is the maker and the son the grateful recipient, Sheers' speaker is the one desperately trying to fix what is slipping. Heaney receives a gift; Sheers tries to take one.
Memory / Elegy: Retrospect and anticipation
Both poems are elegiac, but they operate from different temporal positions. Heaney writes after the fact — his father is already dead, and the harvest bow is a relic kept in the speaker's house: 'The spirit of the corn was here / For a day.' The past tense and the finite 'a day' acknowledge impermanence, but the bow's physical survival into the present — it is still being held — enacts a form of resurrection. The father persists through the made object; the bow is both relic and proof. Sheers writes from within the moment, but the anticipatory elegy is unmistakeable: 'me reaching for some kind of purchase / or at least a shallow handhold in the thought / that with every step apart, I'm another step closer to you.' The conditional retreat from 'purchase' (a firm grip) to 'shallow handhold' (a tentative one) enacts the speaker's uncertainty about whether his consolation will hold. The paradox of the final line — that every step apart is a step closer — is willed philosophy rather than achieved understanding. Heaney has the harvest bow in hand: a physical proof of his father's love that outlasts death. Sheers has only a thought. Both poets memorialise through objects (bow, photograph), but Heaney's elegy is retrospective and resolved; Sheers' is anticipatory and provisional.
Place / Landscape: The land as active presence
Both poems use their respective landscapes not as backdrop but as active participant in the father-son drama. In The Harvest Bow the landscape is distilled into the bow itself — the plaited straw carries 'the mellowed silence' of harvest fields, the 'coil and braid of it' encoding summers of agricultural labour. The landscape is present as memory compressed into a made object; Heaney does not need to describe the fields because the bow is the fields, portable and luminous. In Farther, Sheers uses Skirrid Hill — whose Welsh name means 'shattered' or 'separated' — as mythological scaffold: the 'cleft of earth / split they say by a father's grief / at the loss of his son to man' establishes the landscape as an embodied precedent for the poem's emotional subject. The hill has already enacted the poem's theme in geological time. Heaney's landscape is benign, summered, golden — the harvest bow holds warmth. Sheers' landscape is split, cold, steep; the father's breath 'short and sharp' against 'a blade of wind from the east.' Both poets understand landscape as carrying history and emotion in its physical form, but where Heaney's Irish fields are spaces of consolation and achieved labour, Sheers' Welsh hill is wounded and divided — beautiful but freighted with the very separation the poem explores.
Form / Craft: Making as meaning
Both poems are formally self-conscious, using the act of making as a structural and thematic principle. The Harvest Bow is built around the extended metaphor of the bow as poem — the father's craft and the poet's craft are made analogous: both use humble material (straw, words), both encode love without declaring it, both achieve their effect through what Heaney calls 'tacit art.' The poem closes with an embedded ars poetica: 'The end of art is peace' — a statement that claims for the made object (bow or poem) the capacity to achieve what speech cannot. The bow and the poem arrive at the same destination. In Farther, Sheers' structural principle is not the made object but the paradox — the final line's inversion of distance and closeness ('with every step apart, I'm another step closer to you') is itself a formal act, a chiasmic reversal holding two incompatible truths simultaneously. The poem's free verse and conversational register make the philosophical weight of this close all the more striking. Where Heaney's formal achievement is consolidation — bringing father, son, craft and poem into a single luminous object — Sheers' is suspension: holding anxiety and consolation in a single poised, unresolved line. Both are masterclasses in form serving meaning, but one closes and the other opens.
| The Harvest Bow | Farther | |
|---|---|---|
| Temporal position | Retrospective — father already dead | Anticipatory — father still living but ageing |
| Emotional register | Resolved, tender, celebratory | Anxious, provisional, reaching |
| Masculine communication | Craft as love ('throwaway love-knot') | Action as love (photograph, shared climb) |
| Landscape | Benign, summered, encoded in the bow | Split, cold, mythologically freighted |
| Resolution | Achieved — 'The end of art is peace' | Provisional — 'at least a shallow handhold' |
| Formal strategy | Extended metaphor / ars poetica | Paradox / chiasmus |