its title and its theme, describes seeing "bags of meal passed hand to hand/In close-up by the aid workers" and reminds Heaney of throwing sacks of grain up onto a trailer, and how "Nothing surpassed//That quick unburdening, backbreak's truest payback,/A letting go which will not come again./Or it will, once. And for all." The chain will one day be broken, and for good. The final letting go is the one-off loss of everything. In just two opposing sentences, "The Baler" sets the old beliefs in work, decency and effort against the bleak apprehension of the end:
All day the clunk of a baler
from The Daily Telegraph: Human Chain by Seamus Heaney: review
then The Belfast Telegraph: Seamus Heaney's new collection Human Chain
then The Irish Times: What Heaney means to me
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