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At the outset of his poetic career Seamus Heaney sought his identity through his own digging into his roots in Irish history and culture. He struggled to come to terms with the violent and coarse surfaces of life and his poetic works represented the identity of the subject in the knowing of objects. But the works in The Haw Lantern and Seeing Things deal with the invisibles or absence with firmer views. A central aim of Heaney's work before these works seems to turn the visible into the invisible. But an absence catches the poet's interests more than the politics in
Northern Ireland in his works after the 1980s: his aim is now to make the absent realm or the invisible present and visible by the ordinary expressions. Thus the absence or nothingness expands its meaning beyond itself towards the source of the poet's second thought and the source of the poetic revelation. And some of his works explore the equality of being between the material and the immaterial, between the invisible inner motions and the visible outer world. He gives lights on absences that exist in past or in this phenomenal world. Certain phenomenal objects, if a poet really sees them and apprehends their potentiality, serve as stations to an
otherwise inaccessible underworld of nothingness or absent world. By discovering the meaning of absent being one can understand that of the present and replace or resurrect the absent being. It is an act of deterritorialization of his poetic works and towards the freedom as a poet.