Alias Docker

"sitting strong and blunt as a Celtic cross."

Seamus Heaney’s poem Docker was left out of later compilations of his poems as he grew increasing uncomfortable with his mistaken identity of a docker. Many people from outside Belfast, as Heaney was, would not have distinguished between dockers and shipyard workers; part of the many misunderstandings about “the other side” in Northern Ireland. Shipyard workers, mostly Protestant worked on the east side of the harbour while dockers mostly Roman Catholics, worked in the docks on the west side. Dockers used cranes on the west side of the Lagan river under the cliff edge of the Belfast Hills known as Napoleon’s nose while Titanic’s shipyard workers laboured on the east side of the river

The model is my brother Gerry who posed with the full knowledge of the content of the poem. Paintings hanging from the dado rail allude to the difference between dockers and shipyard workers. .

The cap which juts out “like a gantry’s crossbeam” is more of a sailors cap rather than the then popular duncher. Hopefully the model is perceived to be “sitting strong and blunt as a Celtic cross”, “the sleek pint of porter” is “becollared”, the lips “vice tight” and the jaw is “sledgehead”.

Docker was published in Eleven Poems by Festival Publications Queens University of Belfast with permission from Faber & Faber Limited to “print these poems from Death of a Naturalist” who first published it in 1966.

For a deeper understanding of the issues in this poem and why I have called it Alias Docker rather than just Docker see ;

www.spectator.com.au/2013/09/seamus-heaney-and-northern-irelands-great-divide/

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