I have been thinking about this Seamus Heaney poem for a while now. For some reason, the poem affects my mood. It is difficult to describe the exact effect. Here is an excerpt:
Bone Dreams
I
White bone found
on the grazing:
the rough, porous
language of touch
and its yellowing, ribbed
impression in the grass–
a small ship-burial.
As dead as stone,
flint-find, nugget
of chalk,
I touch it again,
I wind it in
the sling of the mind
to pitch it at England
and follow its drop
to strange fields.
II
Bone-house:
a skeleton
in the tongue’s
old dungeons.
I push back
through dictions,
Elizabethan canopies
Norman devices,
…..
The poem has six sections. I left section two incomplete. The choice of words in the poem creates a heavy atmosphere (words like bone and stone). The poem’s heaviness is also furthered by the situation. Finding a bone in the middle of nowhere is ominous.
Immediately, the narrator starts thinking of where the bone might be from. In this respect, the poem seems to be about origins. The question of origins is not limited to the bone. One extension of this question seems to involve language. In the first stanza, Heaney refers to the “language of touch”. In the third and fourth sections, the gesture toward language is continued with the words “philology” and “grammar.”
The narrator does not know where the bone is from, but they contextualize the the bone in relation to themselves, noting where the bone was found and comparing it to things the narrator knows about. The narrator notes that the bone leaves an “impression in the grass–“. The bone has been moved, but leaves traces behind. Undoubted, the impression in the grass will soon fade. Another fascinating thing the narrator does is to compare the bone to something else. They note that the bone looks like a “nugget/of chalk”.
Because the narrator is only able to bring their context and knowledge to the bone, the narrator is limited in considering the bone’s origin. This seems to be noted through the phrase “sling of mind.”
Poetics Blog 
I’m glad you’re doing this blog. I want to get into poetry more. I get to the end of my rope with philosophy sometimes and need some kind of balance.
Have your read any Rilke?
Yes, some poetry and “Letters to a Young Poet.”
I would really be interested in getting into translation, but that seems kind of daunting. My only other language is German, but I am only proficient. I haven’t had to speak it before. I thought it might be kind of cool to do some translations from German though, maybe with a friend who was more fluent.