Larry Levis: On Elegy: Seamus Heaney’s “Station Island” (January 1994)

Through a close reading of Seamus Heaney’s “Station Island,” the late Larry Levis reflects on the challenge which the elegaic form presents to a writer. Levis believes the dual purpose of the elegy– to remember and to inter the dead– can involve a poet, ambivalent about forsaking the beloved to seek a new object of affection, in an ethical dilemma. Levis looks at the effect of this complexity on Heaney’s poem and concludes that what matters in poetry, as in life, is passion.