The Full Text of “Out of the Bag”
The Full Text of “Out of the Bag”
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“Out of the Bag” Introduction
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Seamus Heaney's four-part poem "Out of the Bag" appears in his 2001 collection Electric Light. Its speaker, the adult Heaney, recalls scenes from his boyhood, particularly the local doctor's periodic visits to his family's home. To the young Heaney, Doctor Kerlin is an impressive figure, and even a little frightening—because Heaney believes he's literally "delivering" new babies that he's assembled in a workshop! This childhood misunderstanding sparks an extended meditation on innocence, imagination, faith, and healing. Weaving together myth and memory, Heaney dreamily recounts visits to the religious shrines at Lourdes and Epidaurus—but keeps returning, in memory, to the plain little bedroom where he and his siblings were born.
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“Out of the Bag” Summary
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As newborns, we all arrived in Doctor Kerlin's bag. He'd show up, vanish into the room, and then come out a little while later to wash those big, plump, curious hands of his in the back kitchen sink. When he reappeared to wash his hands, we could all see that his doctor's bag (with its inner lining as brown as the inside of a spaniel's ear) was empty. It was unlatched and opened wide. Then, as if he were a hypnotist bringing us out of a spell, he'd carefully wind his doctor's tools back into their lining, tying the cloth around them like an apron-string. Then he'd head out the front door, holding his doctor's bag, which looked like a big ship...
Until his next visit came. He'd show up in that fancy coat with the fur lining, which was the same color as the inside of his fancy bag, and go traipsing up to the same room as before. Along with him came the smell of disinfectant, and, like something out of a Dutch painting, a glimpse of his shiny waistcoat and gleaming forceps.
Next we'd get the water ready. It couldn't be too hot or lukewarm; it had to be just right, soft and sudsy, collected from the rain barrel. He really seemed to appreciate it. He wouldn't even let us thank him as he dried off, and then stuck his arms out behind him so he could be helped back into his beautiful camel coat. It was at that point that he once looked right at me. His eyes were unbelievably blue, arctic blue, and I could see right through them into the locked room—cold, white, and milky—I imagined whenever someone said his name. Inside, I'd see clean porcelain surfaces, tiles, steel hooks, and metal surgical instruments. All around the edges of the room, blood soaked into little heaps of sawdust. Little baby parts dangled overhead, hanging from the ceiling—a toe, a foot and an ankle, an arm, even a little penis, which kind of looked like the rosebud Doctor Kerlin wore in his buttonhole.
The learned writer Peter Levi says that, in ancient Greece, instead of hospitals, they had temples dedicated to Asclepius, called "asclepions." The learned writer Graves compares them to shrines like Lourdes. I say this kind of cure is like poetry—it can't be forced. I realized at Epidaurus that the whole place was basically a sanatorium: it had a theater and a gym and baths. It was a place meant for incubation, and by "incubation" I mean something intentional and prescribed, a kind of slumber where you might have a great realization and meet the god...
When I, hatless and dazed, served as a thurifer (an altar server who carries a censer) in an open-air procession at Lourdes in 1956, I almost fainted from the heat and the fumes. At Epidaurus, I almost fainted again bending over to pull out a tuft of grass. Swooning, I hallucinated Doctor Kerlin's face at the foggy glass window of our kitchen. He started tracing stick-figure people on the windowpane. With his large pointer finger, he drew men with dots for faces and dots for buttons going in a line down their fronts. He drew women with dots for breasts, and then drew droopy arms and legs for all the figures. Their limbs quickly started to run and drip. And then, as he washed up in that sudsy water, something miraculous happened: all the baby parts swirled together in his big, clean hands. I revived, sweat dripping into my eyes, blinking and shaky in the bright light.
Some of the grass I pulled I mailed back to someone who was about to start chemotherapy. I sent some more to someone who had finished treatment. I didn't want to leave this place, or join back up with the others. It was mid-afternoon, in the middle of May, before all the tourists arrive. I was in the territory of the god, where the very temple of Asclepius once stood. All I wanted was to lie down in the shade of the weeds and grasses so that, when the sun was directly overhead, I could be visited by Hygeia, Asclepius's daughter. Her name enlightens and uplifts, just like her, a shadow passing from the door.
The room I came from, and where the rest of us came from, stays utterly real from where I stand, looking back in time. In that room, my mom is sleeping on the special sheets put on just for the doctor. Those white sheets were wedding presents, and they showed up again and again whenever someone was born died.
I'm at the bedside, truly incubating this time, looking at her. She sees me as she closes and opens her eyes, smiling faintly. I did this every time: I'd show up at her bedside to ask if she needed help, so she could ask me, in a proud, hoarse whisper, "And what do you think of the new little baby the doctor brought for all of us while I was sleeping?"
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“Out of the Bag” Themes
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Childhood Innocence and Imagination
Seamus Heaney’s “Out of the Bag” illustrates the power and potency of an innocent child’s imagination. The poem’s speaker, whom readers can take to be Heaney himself, explains (in a way) how he and his siblings were born. But this isn’t your textbook discussion of the birds and the bees: instead, Heaney asserts that “All of us came in Doctor Kerlin’s bag.” That is, the young Heaney thought the family doctor delivered babies much as a postman delivers a package. Through this story, Heaney illustrates how children's imaginations try to make sense of events they don’t quite understand.
To the young speaker, the arrival of each new baby was astonishing, mysterious, and even a little horrific. At the center of these memories is the imperious figure of Doctor Kerlin, who, to the young speaker, represented wealth, status, forbidden knowledge, and even godlike authority. From the speaker’s naive perspective, everything about Doctor Kerlin seems shiny and luxurious. His hands are “nosy, rosy, big, soft,” and he carries a mysterious, bulging black bag. As a young child, Heaney didn’t really understand what the doctor did in “the locked room” (where, presumably, his mother was giving birth). Captivated by the sight of Doctor Kerlin’s empty surgeon’s bag, he imagined a grim, sterile workshop with separate "infant parts" hanging "up near the ceiling," ready to be assembled. No wonder he’s impressed by and even a little frightened of Doctor Kerlin!
The poem’s title is a pun on this childhood misunderstanding. The phrase “Out of the Bag” doesn’t just refer to the doctor's bag but to a truth being revealed—in this case, the truth about sex and childbirth, knowledge of which spells the end of childhood innocence.
Looking back as an adult, with this truth long since “out of the bag,” the speaker no longer views the world as quite so big, magical, or frightening. The mature Heaney seemingly tries to recapture some of the wonder of childhood: he visits supposedly holy, healing sites and longs for a visit from Hygeia, goddess of cleanliness, whose name echoes the description of Doctor Kerlin’s “hygienic hands." The poem hints that Heaney is nostalgic for the sense of grandeur and mystery his childhood naivete allowed him to experience. At one of the healing sites, he even “hallucinate[s]” Doctor Kerlin putting “baby bits” together.
The poem suggests that adult knowledge, once “out of the bag,” can’t be stuffed back in. Yet Heaney can still appreciate the suggestive power of a young child’s mind; his childhood perspective remains potent and accessible. In fact, he ends the poem with a description of himself as a child at his mother’s bedside: “The room I came from and the rest of us all came from / Stays pure reality [...] Standing the passage of time.” The stories he told himself as a child were so powerful that, even as an adult, the memory still feels real and true. He may no longer see the world through a child’s eyes, but through the work of imagination, he can still recapture that innocent outlook.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-37
- Lines 50-67
- Lines 70-79
- Lines 80-82
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Myth, Medicine, and Healing
In “Out of the Bag,” Seamus Heaney muses on the connection between mystery, belief, and medicine. The poem implicitly compares the young Heaney’s innocent beliefs about childbirth with scenes of the adult Heaney’s visits to sites of healing in both Greek myth and Catholic tradition. On one level, this suggests that modern religion and ancient myth aren’t all that different from the stories naïve children tell themselves about how the world works. Yet the speaker doesn’t entirely dismiss the power of belief to create “reality” and, indeed, serve a healing purpose. Medicine isn’t just a scientific discipline, the poem suggests; it’s also the domain of faith, myth, and the miraculous.
Heaney begins the poem by describing how, as a small child, he was awed by the godlike figure of his family doctor, Doctor Kerlin, who he believed literally delivered babies in his bag. He then abruptly switches to a discussion of ancient healing shrines, implying a kind of continuity between these holy sites and his childhood imagination. Both, the poem suggests, demonstrate how belief can shape experience.
Heaney notes that asclepions—shrines to the Greek god of medicine, Asclepius—“Were the equivalent of hospitals // In ancient Greece.” There, “incubation” was the domain of “ritual.” The word “incubation” echoes the idea that babies would grow, or incubate, in Doctor Kerlin’s bag, suggesting a further connection between these ancient sites and Heaney’s childhood imaginings. Alluding to the old belief that Asclepius would visit the sick in their sleep, Heaney adds that healing, to the ancients, could also entail an encounter with the divine: a process that culminated in “epiphany,” when “you met the god."
Heaney then links Greek myth with modern religion by mentioning Lourdes, a place famous in Catholicism for its supposed healing powers. There, a teenage Heaney, ironically, once nearly passed out from the heat. When the same thing happens at Epidaurus, he hallucinates a vision of Doctor Kerlin—essentially having an encounter with the “god” of his childhood!
Even though he no longer, as an adult, thinks Doctor Kerlin was assembling babies out of parts stashed in his bag, he hasn’t totally divorced himself from the transformative power of belief in general. As a young child, the arrival of a little brother or sister seemed as astonishing and inexplicable as the religious miracles performed at Lourdes, or the tranquility and mystery of Epidaurus. The adult Heaney doesn’t necessarily think these places can truly bring a person back to health. (Again, he nearly faints from heat exhaustion in both!) But he seems to respect the power they hold for those who do believe. For example, he takes grass clippings from Epidaurus to send to a cancer patient undergoing chemotherapy, and he imagines lying down in the weeds to “be visited in the very eye of the day” by the Greek goddess of cleanliness, Hygeia.
He also suggests that the power of mythical sites is not unlike “the cure / By poetry that cannot be coerced.” In other words, he thinks there’s something genuinely transformative about these places where medicine was associated with the divine. They can “cure” people in much the same way art, or art-making, can provide fulfillment and a soothing release. Just as the rituals of childbirth struck the young Heaney as mysterious and compelling, the rituals of healing retain a kind of magical, even mythical, significance for the adult poet.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-37
- Lines 38-49
- Lines 50-67
- Lines 68-79
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Poetry and the Creative Process
Parts of “Out of the Bag” emphasize the healing power of art, and link Heaney’s meditations on birth and “incubation” to the creative process itself. While the young Heaney didn’t understand what was happening when the formidable Doctor Kerlin arrived, the adult Heaney connects the power and mystery of medicine with that of art and poetry. He even goes so far as to suggest that poetry can be both generative and healing in its own right. It’s not just doctors and poets who can exercise these godlike powers, either: mothers (including Heaney’s mother) are like artists, too, bringing forth new life.
The poem initially introduces the figure of the doctor as a kind of god or magician: a mysterious, powerful person who inspires fear, respect, and awe. Now, as an adult, Heaney no longer believes that Doctor Kerlin assembled babies in his grim, sterile workshop. But he does continue to see him as a kind of artist, someone who can execute a miracle—as when he envisions “The baby bits all [coming] together swimming // Into his soapy big hygenic hands.”
Heaney also gives scholars and writers like Peter Levi and Robert Graves the honorary title “poeta doctus,” or learned poet. While Levi and Graves weren’t MDs, Heaney uses the word “doctus” to suggest that they do, in fact, practice a trade not unlike Doctor Kerlin's. Heaney makes the point that art and literature, like medicine, depend on profound belief—and that poetry, in particular, can offer its own kind of “cure.”
The creative process is also exemplified by Heaney’s mother, whose very body is “[a] site of incubation”—a place where another, fragile body is sheltered as it develops—and who achieves something miraculous when she delivers a new baby. Is the artistic process like motherhood, or is the mother like an artist? The parallel Heaney draws seems to go both ways. As Heaney sees it, birth, like writing and healing, involves a kind of spiritual passage or crossing-over. Tied to this idea is his invocation of Hygeia, the Greek goddess of health and the daughter of Asclepius, whom he depicts as a metaphorical threshold—“a haven of light” and an “undarkening door” one might pass through.
Notably, Heaney’s mother not only gave birth to him and his siblings, she also invented the story that helped Heaney make sense of where babies come from. In this way, she’s a storyteller as well as a mother. Like a writer successfully bringing a long poem to fruition, she shares the news of her achievement in a “hoarsened whisper of triumph”—even though she herself never takes credit for “the new wee baby the doctor brought for us all.”
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 8-37
- Lines 38-67
- Lines 75-79
- Lines 80-94
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Origins, Myth-Making, and Memory
“Out of the Bag” begins and ends in the same setting: “The room I came from and the rest of us came from.” As the poem comes full circle, Heaney ties memories of family births into a broader exploration of where people come from and how stories shape their lives and sense of self. In Heaney’s case, his own origin story becomes a kind of myth: as a young child, he believed that he and all of his siblings arrived in Doctor Kerlin’s big black bag. But this story is itself a kind of inheritance, since it was Heaney’s mother who planted the seed in his imagination. And even though the story wasn’t true, Heaney can’t help but return to it throughout his life, just as he mentally revisits the room where he and his siblings were born. In this way, the poem’s title (a pun) takes on additional meaning: the “Bag” becomes, metaphorically, the repository of stories, fantasies, and memories Heaney carries with him still.
The room Heaney was born in is point of origin for him and much of his family. Although he refers to it only obliquely in Part I of the poem, by Part IV, it becomes a kind of universal starting place, “The room I came from and the rest of us came from.” Although Heaney has had plenty of time to reevaluate what took place in that locked room (certainly, he’s learned about childbirth, and no longer thinks Doctor Kerlin was pulling a newly-assembled infant out of his doctor’s bag), his memory of the room itself hasn’t faded. Instead, it “[s]tays pure reality”—remains tangible and accessible.
As a result, the room isn’t just where he literally “came from”; it also speaks to where Heaney is coming from. Fantasies and family stories like those Heaney remembers don’t just help us make sense of what’s going on around us as children. They continue to shape our worldviews for the rest of our lives. The tale of how “[a]ll of us came in Doctor Kerlin’s bag” becomes, for Heaney, an important myth, a key part of his personal cosmology. In this way, it’s not unlike the other belief systems he references, like the ancient Greek healing arts or the stories of miracles performed at Lourdes.
But this bit of family lore has special significance for Heaney because it came from his mother, who, exhausted after giving birth, asked him, “And what do you think / Of the new wee baby the doctor brought for us all / When I was asleep?” This revelation, at the very end of the poem, reframes the poem’s title. Before, the reader might have understood the title as a punning reference to the idiom “the cat’s out of the bag,” meaning that secret information has been spilled. In Heaney’s case, this idiom could refer to the truth about childbirth and where he “came from.” But the "Bag," as a symbol, also comes to mean more than that. It’s a vessel or storehouse of memory, from which Heaney, the poeta doctus (or learned poet), pulls images for his art.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-37
- Lines 80-94
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Out of the Bag”
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Lines 1-6
All of us ...
... spaniel's inside lug)"Out of the Bag" begins with a strange declaration. Speaking in the first person plural, the speaker announces that "All of us came in Doctor Kerlin's bag." As the poem progresses, it will become clear that "us" refers to the speaker and his siblings. (Heaney himself was one of nine children!) And who is Doctor Kerlin? The poem is about to sketch him in great detail, but for now, the speaker seems more interested in the bag he'd "arrive with." Even as Doctor Kerlin vanishes into "the room" and prepares to do his work, the speaker stays fixated on the bag, keeping track of whether it's open or closed, empty or full.
Already, then, there's something mysterious about the bag. But there's also something ominous about the doctor. The speaker isn't allowed to follow him into "the room" (notice how the definite article "the" sets the room apart, signaling that there's something special about it). At the same time, Doctor Kerlin's arrival seems familiar or habitual: clearly, it's happened more than once before.
The speaker then watches, entranced, as Doctor Kerlin "reappear[s]" and scrubs his hands in the "scullery basin": a small, back-room sink for washing dishes and the like. The speaker again takes special note of Kerlin's bag, whose "lined insides," he observes, are "The colour of a spaniel's inside lug." (The term "lug," a UK colloquialism for ear, offers a clue as to the poem's setting.) In other words, the bag has a rich brown, shiny, soft interior lining. The sight of this luxurious fabric seems to have embedded itself in the speaker's memory.
The first two stanzas don't reveal too much about the speaker. The diction suggests an adult voice, but already, there are clues that this speaker is recalling events from early childhood. Consider line 4: "Those nosy, rosy, big, soft hands of his." The long string of adjectives, plus the internal rhyme of "nosy" and "rosy," is whimsical, enthusiastic, and childlike. This stanza also contains lots of sibilance, or soft /s/ and /z/ sounds:
Those nosy, rosy, big, soft hands of his
In the scullery basin, its lined insidesOne could almost think of these sounds as the lisping of a young child. Even as the speaker revisits this childhood scene with the knowledge of an adult, he remains faithful to the impression Doctor Kerlin left so many years ago.
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Lines 7-12
Were empty for ...
... door and leave -
Lines 13-18
With the bag ...
... on the forceps. -
Lines 19-24
Getting the water ...
... suddenly behind him -
Lines 25-31
To be squired ...
... chill of tiles, -
Lines 31-37
steel hooks, chrome ...
... in his buttonhole. -
Lines 38-43
Poeta doctus ...
... cannot be coerced, -
Lines 44-49
Say I, who ...
... met the god... -
Lines 50-55
Hatless, groggy, shadowing ...
... grass and hallucinated -
Lines 56-61
Doctor Kerlin at ...
... sausage-arms and legs -
Lines 62-67
That soon began ...
... the windless light. -
Lines 68-73
Bits of the ...
... of the god, -
Lines 74-79
The very site ...
... the undarkening door. -
Lines 80-85
The room I ...
... births and deaths. -
Lines 86-90
Me at the ...
... enter every time, -
Lines 90-94
to assist and ...
... I was asleep?"
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“Out of the Bag” Symbols
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The Bag
Doctor Kerlin's bag can contain a whole lot—both literally and metaphorically. The bag was fascinating to the young Heaney, although the poem takes its time revealing why. In the third stanza, the bag is compared to an open mouth, "Unsnibbed and gaping wide." Later, in line 13, it becomes a "plump ark," a vessel of biblical proportions. What could possibly be inside?
In its very impenetrability, the bag comes to symbolize the mysteries of childhood and forbidden, adult knowledge. Heaney projects his childish misunderstandings onto the bag, which he believes contains a newborn baby—or a mixed-up assemblage of baby parts. Through the title especially, the bag also becomes a symbol of memory. It's "Out of" this figurative "Bag" that Heaney plucks the memories and experiences recorded in the poem. And memory is something he carries with him everywhere, just as the doctor does his bag.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Line 1: “All of us came in Doctor Kerlin's bag.”
- Lines 5-8: “its lined insides / (The colour of a spaniel's inside lug) / Were empty for all to see, the trap-sprung mouth / Unsnibbed and gaping wide.”
- Line 13: “With the bag in his hand, a plump ark by the keel...”
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“Out of the Bag” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Allusion
"Out of the Bag" is full of classical allusions, which showcase Heaney's extensive learning and deep knowledge of Greek mythology in particular. These allusions tie Heaney's childhood anecdote to larger cultural narratives about healing and belief. They also emphasize how much more Heaney knows now, as the adult speaker of the poem, than he did when he was a child. He's far more worldly than the young boy who believed the doctor "delivered" newborn babies to the house in a big leather bag. But he's still fascinated by the power of these myths, and he uses them to make vivid connections to his own experiences.
In line 27, for instance, Heaney describes the doctor's eyes as "Hyberborean," or "beyond-the-north-wind blue." According to the ancient Greek author Herodotus, Hyperborea was an evergreen paradise located in the far north. Here, the allusion to Greek myth anticipates Heaney's visit to the shrine at Epidaurus later in the poem. It also stresses how otherworldly—even inhuman—the godlike Doctor Kerlin seemed to young Heaney.
Later, in section II, Heaney identifies two scholars by name: Peter Levi and Robert Graves. He's referring most directly, here, to their writings about healing sites like Lourdes (in France) and Epidaurus (in Greece). But he's also alluding to a larger body of work on myth, including Graves's influential book The White Goddess (1948). He's invoking a scholarly tradition focused on how cultures use storytelling to make sense of history. Knowing this, the reader can better appreciate that Heaney is trying to do the same kind of work in this poem.
In line 39, Heaney alludes to the Greek god of healing, Asclepius, whom he then mentions again in line 49: "When epiphany occurred and you met the god." By referring to Asclepius simply as "the god," Heaney makes him sound all the more mysterious and powerful. Though Asclepius belongs to a whole pantheon of gods, Epidaurus is the place where he reigns supreme. The "temple of Asclepius" at Epidaurus comes up again in lines 73-74, followed by a reference to the goddess "Hygeia," Asclepius's daughter, whose name is the source of the English word "hygiene."
Where allusion appears in the poem:- Line 27: “Hyperborean, beyond-the-north-wind blue,”
- Lines 38-42: “Poeta doctus / Peter Levi says / Sanctuaries of Asclepius (called / asclepions / ) / Were the equivalent of hospitals / In ancient Greece. Or of shrines like Lourdes, / Says poeta doctus Graves. ”
- Lines 48-49: “meaning sleep / When epiphany occurred and you met the god...”
- Lines 73-74: “In the precincts of the god, / The very site of the temple of Asclepius.”
- Lines 77-78: “And to be visited in the very eye of the day / By Hygeia, his daughter,”
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Colloquialism
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Enjambment
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Alliteration
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"Out of the Bag" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Scullery
- Spaniel
- Lug
- Unsnibbed
- Hypnotist
- Keel
- Ark
- Waistcoat satin
- Forceps
- Plumping hot
- Rain-butt
- Squired
- Hyperborean
- Dreeps
- Pendent
- Poeta doctus
- Peter Levi
- Asclepius
- Graves
- Lourdes
- Epidaurus
- Sanatorium
- Thurifer
- Laved
- Miraculum
- Precincts
- Hogweed
- Hygeia
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(Location in poem: Line 5: “In the scullery basin,”; Lines 56-57: “Doctor Kerlin at the steamed-up glass / Of our / window,”; Line 57: “scullery”)
The section of a kitchen (or a small room attached to a kitchen) where dishes are washed and food is prepared.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Out of the Bag”
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Form
"Out of the Bag" is divided into four parts:
- Part I contains 13 stanzas. With one exception, these stanzas are all tercets (that is, they have three lines). The final stanza of this section, however, consists of just one line. The line itself is a strange little flourish—much like the buttonhole "rosebud" it describes. Given that the speaker is taking stock of imagined body parts, which he believes the doctor will fashion into a new baby, one might think of line 37 as an extra piece, like the optional "cock" Heaney mentions in the line before.
- Part II contains 10 tercets.
- Part III contains four tercets.
- Part IV contains five tercets.
Since the poem concerns gestation and "incubation," its three-line stanzas might gesture toward the three trimesters of a typical pregnancy.
Although Heaney braids the major themes of the poem throughout all four sections, each part seems to correspond to a different train of thought. Part I sketches young Heaney's fascination with Doctor Kerlin, and reveals that he believed Kerlin assembled newborn babies before bringing them to the house in his bag. Part II introduces an adult perspective, as a worldly, mature Heaney shares some of what he's learned about sacred sites of healing. Part II also vividly describes Heaney's experience at Lourdes, where, faint from the heat, he had a vision of Doctor Kerlin. Part III describes the spiritual experience of visiting the temple of Asclepius in Epidaurus. Finally, Part IV returns to Heaney's childhood home. This final section reveals, in a bittersweet twist, that it was Heaney's mom who told him the doctor had brought the "wee baby" while she was sleeping.
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Meter
"Out of the Bag" uses free verse, meaning that it has no strict meter. Despite its consistent division into tercets, it has an easy, almost conversational rhythm. This gives the poem an intimate or confessional quality and accommodates Heaney's loose, fluid, wandering narrative style.
It's worth noting that a high proportion of the lines are in iambic pentameter (lines with 10 or 11 syllables and a da-DUM, da-DUM rhythm), which provides a kind of baseline that the poem wanders from and returns to. Listen to this pattern in lines 3-4, for example:
And by | the time | he'd re- | appear | to wash
Those no- | sy, ro- | sy, big, | soft hands | of his
Iambic pentameter is the most familiar meter in English-language poetry. By departing from and returning to it, the poem's form might subtly reflect the movement of Heaney's thoughts, which drift into imagined scenes and memories of travel but keep returning to memories of home.
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Rhyme Scheme
"Out of the Bag" doesn't use a rhyme scheme. Because it also lacks a consistent meter, it's an example of free verse. The lack of rhyme gives the poem a natural-sounding, almost confessional flow. It makes the language, musical as it is, feel fairly spontaneous, as if words are flowing naturally to Heaney as he muses on his childhood. Although many of Heaney's poems do rhyme—often with a mix of exact and slant rhymes—most of his longer, more meditative pieces (like this one) do not.
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“Out of the Bag” Speaker
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Since "Out of the Bag" is an autobiographical poem, it's fair to consider Seamus Heaney its speaker. Although Heaney writes as an adult looking back on childhood, his recall is sharp, and he moves seamlessly through memories of different times in his life. This suggests a kind of continuity of experience: he still feels, on some level, like the boy who believed babies were delivered to the house in the doctor's bag. His youth remains vividly accessible to him.
Indeed, Heaney declines to highlight the fact that he's remembering events from decades ago. He doesn't, for example, begin the poem by saying, "When I was a boy, I believed / All of us came in Doctor Kerlin's bag." (The one exception to this rule comes in line 52, when Heaney specifies that his trip to Lourdes took place "in '56.") Although he's writing in the past tense, the scenes he describes feel immediate and present, rich with sensory detail like the "whiff / Of disinfectant" that seemed to follow Doctor Kerlin.
Part I of the poem illustrates Heaney's youthful imagination. The young speaker comes across as sensitive, impressionable, and highly observant. The beginning of Part II reflects Heaney's erudition as a teacher and scholar—someone who read deeply and widely, and who often looked into the distant past to reframe his own experiences. Part III reveals that, even as an adult, Heaney remains convinced that belief, in itself, can be a powerful thing. Though he may no longer be as intimately connected to the Catholic observances of his youth, he retains a profound spirituality. For him, literature and myth are still revelatory.
In section IV, Heaney returns to the scene of his childhood, but with clearer hindsight. The adult Heaney seems more present in this section than in Part I. He offers commentary that wouldn't have occurred to him as a boy, as when he remarks that the sheets on his mother's bed were brought out specifically for the doctor's visit, and that they were "wedding presents / That showed up again and again, bridal / And usual and useful at births and deaths." This stanza sums up quite a bit of life experience and family history, and reflects how much time has passed since Heaney last stood at his mother's bedside. The twist in the final stanza gains ironic power because Heaney, looking back as an adult, now knows where babies really come from—and so understands far more about the nature of his mother's experience.
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“Out of the Bag” Setting
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"Out of the Bag" begins in Seamus Heaney's childhood home in County Derry, Northern Ireland. Heaney grew up on his family's farm in a rural county of Northern Ireland; that farm, called Mossbawn, is the subject and setting of many of his poems about childhood and family. Heaney often described Mossbawn as his "omphalos," or a place central to his poetic imagination. In this poem, the inside of the family home (with its "scullery" and "rain-butt," or rain-barrel) bookends Heaney's wide-ranging meditations on childbirth, storytelling, medicine, and healing. Part I of the poem also draws the reader into an imagined "room": an icy workshop where baby parts hang from the ceiling and blood-soaked sawdust lines the walls. This terrible room doesn't actually exist, but it popped into the speaker's childhood mind "Every time [Doctor Kerlin's] name was mentioned," because he imagined that was where Kerlin assembled the babies he delivered.
The setting shifts in Parts II and III, as Heaney recalls experiences in Derry, Greece, and France. He introduces the ancient city of Epidaurus, where he once visited the ruins of the temple of Asclepius. There, Heaney saw the remains of a sprawling complex complete with "theatre and gymnasium and baths." As Heaney remembers it, Epidaurus was filled with "mid-day, mid-May, pre-tourist sunlight," so hot and bright that he "nearly fainted." Similarly, his memories of the town and shrine of Lourdes are eclipsed by the unbearable "heat," as well as the heady smell of the incense he was tasked with carrying. His memories of Epidaurus yield to a hallucinatory vision of the "scullery window" at Mossbawn, where Doctor Kerlin appears, drawing stick-figures on the "steamed-up glass."
Finally, Heaney returns to his childhood home—specifically, the room in which he and his siblings were born. This room is, literally and figuratively, Heaney's starting place: "[t]he room I came from and the rest of us came from." It doesn't fade in his memory, but remains "pure reality [...] Standing the passage of time," unchanged and everlasting. In this room, there was a bed, made up in special-occasion sheets "put on for the doctor." These sheets came out whenever someone was born or died; their presence signaled that something significant was happening. Heaney recalls his exhausted mother resting in the bed, opening and closing her eyes. Her smiling gaze seemed a place in itself: a "precinct of vision" that he would "enter every time" he visited her bedside after a new birth.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Out of the Bag”
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Literary Context
“Out of the Bag” appeared in Heaney’s tenth collection of poems, Electric Light, which was published in 2001. By this time, Heaney was already well established as one of the foremost English-language poets of his generation: he had won the Nobel Prize in Literature just a few years before, in 1995. Today, Heaney remains the most celebrated Irish poet of the 20th century after William Butler Yeats. Like much of Heaney’s poetry, "Out of the Bag" explores myth and legend along with memories of his rural upbringing in County Derry, Northern Ireland.
Heaney graduated from Queen's University, Belfast (QUB) in 1961 and had his first poems published in student magazines during this time. After publishing his first collection, Death of a Naturalist, in 1966, he was appointed an English lecturer at QUB. Heaney would go on to become the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University (a position he held from 1985 to 1997). He also served as the Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1989-1994.
Heaney's early influences include Robert Frost (1874-1963)—who, like Heaney, often dealt with topics and themes related to the natural world—as well as the English Romantic poet John Keats (1795-1821). In his 1995 Nobel Prize lecture, Heaney referred to Keats's ode "To Autumn" as the "ark of the covenant between language and sensation." Yeats (1865-1939) was another significant influence, and was the subject of Heaney’s influential essays "Yeats as an Example?" (1978) and "A Tale of Two Islands: Reflections on the Irish Literary Revival" (1980). Heaney is the best-known poet of the Northern School, a group of Northern Irish poets who began to garner attention in the 1960s, during the start of the Troubles (a period of political and cultural unrest in their country).
Although much of Heaney’s most famous work deals with the rural Northern Irish scenes of his childhood, Heaney also engaged deeply with classical and ancient literature. He produced several notable translations, including versions of the Old Irish poem Buile Shuibhne (which he translated as Sweeney Astray), the Old English epic Beowulf, and works by Ovid and Virgil. Heaney shows off some of his knowledge of Greek and Latin myth and religion in “Out of the Bag,” which also incorporates information he’s learned from poet-scholars like Robert Graves and Peter Levi.
Historical Context
Heaney was born in Northern Ireland in 1939. He grew up in a country wracked by what became known as "the Troubles" or the Northern Ireland conflict. The Troubles (c. 1968-1998) were a dispute between Protestant unionists, who wanted Ireland to remain a part of the United Kingdom, and Roman Catholic nationalists, who wanted Northern Ireland to join the Republic of Ireland. The struggle was often violent, and more than 3,600 people were killed and 30,000 wounded in these decades.
Decades of sectarian violence ended only with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. This landmark peace accord marked a new era in which Northern Irish residents could individually elect to identify as Irish, British, or both. It also sketched out a pathway for the reunification of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland in the south. By the time Heaney published “Out of the Bag” in 2001, conditions in Northern Ireland were relatively peaceful. While some of Heaney's earlier collections, like his 1975 book North, dealt directly with the legacy of violence in his homeland, Electric Light explored a wider range of topics, including travel and translation.
Heaney was the eldest of nine children. His family’s farm, Mossbawn, is a central place in his literary imagination, and the setting he returns to most frequently in his poems (as he does in “Out of the Bag"). According to Heaney, Mossbawn is his “omphalos,” or central source—the wellspring of memory and poetry. That sense of mythical, timeless centrality comes through here in lines 80-82, for example: "The room I came from and the rest of us all came from / Stays pure reality where I stand alone, / Standing the passage of time."
This poem also finds Heaney visiting two historically and culturally significant places. In Part II, he visits the Greek historical site called Epidaurus, home of the asclepion or Sanctuary of Asclepius mentioned in line 39. This site was a well-known healing center in antiquity; sick people would make pilgrimages there to be visited and cured by the healing god Asclepius. Heaney also mentions his 1956 visit to Lourdes, France, site of the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes. Since the mid-19th century, when a girl named Bernadette Soubirous claimed to see visions of the Virgin Mary there, Lourdes has been a major hub of religious tourism (for Catholics in particular).
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More “Out of the Bag” Resources
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External Resources
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Heaney's Nobel Lecture — The author of "Out of the Bag" won the Nobel Prize in 1995. Read his speech for the occasion, in which he pays tribute to influences like John Keats.
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Heaney's Life and Work — The Poetry Foundation provides an in-depth biography of the celebrated poet.
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Seamus Heaney's Work and Writings — Read an overview of Heaney's literary, scholarly, and broadcasting career, compiled by the executors of his estate.
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Learn about Lourdes — "Out of the Bag" recalls a pilgrimage the young Seamus Heaney made to Lourdes in 1956. Learn more about this famous site, and why it is so significant for Catholics around the world.
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The Temple of Asclepius — Learn more about the Temple of Asclepius at Epidaurus, courtesy of this archaeological site database compiled by the University of Warwick.
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The Art of Poetry with Seamus Heaney — Heaney joins the poet Henri Cole in conversation for The Paris Review. Their conversation includes details about Heaney's mother and early childhood.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Seamus Heaney
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