The psychological reserve (“Coming close again by holding back”) that became the hallmark of their adult relationship is no better exemplified than in Heaney’s use of bedroom linen to evoke a subsisting emotional complex where the most common of gestures becomes laden with powerful meaning (“So we’d stretch and fold and end up hand to hand/For a split second as if nothing had happened”). The latent tension between the two is further exemplified by Heaney’s reference to tic-tac-toe, which, for equally-suited players, is a zero sum game that cannot be won or lost. Heaney uses the words “cool,” “dried-out,” “sail in a cross-wind” and “touch and go” strategically so that, when we read the last line, the family’s poverty seems to be offered as a way to explain the source of the polarities that produced the “cross-wind” between the two, with the violence of “ripped out flour sacks” as signified scar tissue.
In Sonnet VI Heaney calls this part of his formative years “our Sons and Lovers phase,” finding that elevated strain of sarcasm and sympathy that in lesser poets would otherwise serve as self-pity in his own version of D.H. Lawrence’s infamous mother-son conflict. But within the sonnet sequence we come to understand that their relationship is far more significant than the facial portraits in these few descriptions of their time together. Something is clearly happening in the spaces “behind the linear black” of the verse. Upon his mother’s death (Sonnet VII) other revelations supervene: