In his classic nineteenth-century expression of national sentiment, ‘The Library of Ireland’, Thomas Davis grounded his own sense of nationality in the elemental, organic and stable:

The Irish nation, Davis insists, is no mere sandbank but the ancestral site of an unyielding, natural continuity. Therein land and history organically suture one another. This kind of binding of place to identity and history in acts of natural union has tended to predominate all the way through to the present in Irish poetry, when the land is claimed via pastoral modes as the foundational realm of the national self. Seamus Heaney's landscape poetry is a canonical example of these processes, especially through Wintering Out and into North, given his effort to ‘politicize the terrain’ of his earlier collections. Hence, poems such as ‘Gifts of Rain’, ‘Anahorish’ and ‘Broagh’ open up the familial belonging of the parish in his earlier work to a wider communal territorial claim in which language, self and place cohere in establishing an identity that not only founds itself but also excludes those deemed outsiders or others. In ‘Gifts of Rain’ language and landscape entwine in natural identity: ‘The tawny guttural water / spells itself: Moyola.’