A selection of Heaney's poems in Door Into the Dark are concerned with landscapes and what they mean for their inhabitants. I said in my blue book writing on "Digging" that "Heaney is spacing himself from his father and grandfather after the alliterated lines...Similar to how Larkin looks back and wonders what people thought of him when he was younger, Heaney looks back and distinguishes himself from the past generations." This makes sense when we look at what Ireland was doing post- WWII. England had pulled back after experiencing the vast destruction caused by the war, and artists like Heaney and Larkin reflected this in their cynical, slightly rebellious and obscene (for the time) poetry.
In "Peninsula" we get this pulled back, even escapist, feeling from our narrator who ironically enough starts his poem to us in a nurturing older brother way/ advice column way. His tone is more instructional, in the first few lines, then flows into a gentle description of the peninsula's landscape, and returns back to advising. In this way Heaney follows suit of his previous work and Larkin, but then deviates when he describes the landscape and his ultimate moral. He uses phrases like "horizons drink down sea and hill" and "ploughed fields swallow..." with repeated imagery of consumption, almost like gulping down medicine to get rid of an ailment or vacuuming something up to make sure that its not there anymore. Then "you're in the dark again," literally and metaphorically. As a spectator of war, he saw the consumption of human life in its most horrific light but he is now just as lost as he was before, until he reaches his final stanza. In it he says that you may not have something new to talk about, but you will have a greater understanding of what is now around you and how it was shaped, "in their extremity."
