Analyse and explain the theme of marriage in Seamus Heaney's Glanmore Sonnets, specifically, sonnet I:Vowels ploughed into other: opened ground....

The theme of marriage does not seem to be especially prominent
in the very first of Seamus Heaney’s Glanmore Sonnets. The sonnets were
written in response to a move, by Heaney, his wife, and their children, from violent Northern
Ireland to a much more peaceful, rural life in an area south of Dublin in the Irish Republic. The
poet’s wife, however, is nowhere explicitly mentioned in the opening sonnet of the sequence, nor
is marriage as an institution. Instead, the twin focuses of the poem seem to be on farming and on
art – two forms of creativity.

Heaney opens the poem with a splendid
example of a description whose very sounds illustrate the thing described: “Vowels ploughed into
other” (1). Here the jamming together of the “ow” sounds of the first two words forces the reader
to speak the very idea the phrasing presents. (Similarly skillful use of assonance (and also
alliteration) occurs in the first two words of line 3: “Is mist.”) The next two lines celebrate
the peaceful beauty of the weather and the earth:

readability="5">

The mildest February for twenty years
Is mist
bands over furrows . . . (2-3)

The
imagery of line 3 is particularly memorable and beautiful, as is the striking reference, later in
that line, to a “deep no sound” – a wonderful way of mentioning silence without using the
over-used word “silence.” But Heaney is careful to guard against any facile,
simple-minded romanticism. Thus, in the next line he makes sure to mention that this “no sound”
is “Vulnerable to distant gargling tractors” (4). The idyllic rural landscape is not entirely
free, or distant from, the rumblings of machines, and indeed it is probably these very machines
that have created the appealing “furrows.” The poem presents no easy opposition between the land
and industry; industry helps farmers till the land and prepare for the coming of the crops: “the
turned-up acres breathe” (5).

The speaker, as artist and poet, is
inspired by the beauty of the ploughed earth:

readability="5">

I am quickened with a redolence
Of farmland as a
dark unblown rose. (10-11).

Like the
rose that has not yet fully opened, the true beauty of the tilled land will not be fully apparent
until it blooms. In the poem’s final lines, the speaker anticipates the bounty of the harvest –
both literal and (figuratively) artistic – that is yet to
come.

Although marriage is not an explicit theme in this poem,
images of the ploughing of fields have long been associated with human sexuality and human
fertility (as in Shakespeare’s 3rd sonnet), and certainly the speaker of this poem seems alive to
twin ideals of sowing seeds and watching them develop.