He was weary of repeating things that he knew already and of the hammering away, for the sake of a thick-witted fellow, at something that he understood from the beginning.
When I reflect on all that happened later, I ask myself if I was thick-witted not to see that there was in Charles Strickland at least something out of the common.
Heaney described him in Stepping Stones as "a thick-witted farm labourer reeking of sour pig meal and parish piety, someone who gave me a way of writing about the local subculture." Later, having written an essay on the history of literary magazines in Ireland, Heaney wrote, "what I got from doing the essay was that the local was workable literary matter and a hint that I myself might be able to work with it." He used the image he wrote about his response to "The Great Hunger," "an amplified language that could knock you sideways" in Stepping Stones and repeated a version of the image in the memorable lines from "Postscript" when while driving along the Flaggy Shore in Clare "big soft bufferings come at the car sideways/And catch the heart off guard and it open."
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