Two Lorries

“Two Lorries” takes place across two distinct time periods—the distant past and the near past for the speaker. The exact year and age of the speaker as a child are not given, but we know that Seamus Heaney was born in 1939; therefore, as the second stanza establishes the time to be within the 1940s, we can imagine him to be somewhere between five and ten years old. He is young enough to be distracted by the coal and the thought of the perfect ashes it will bring, but old enough to feel some responsibility to his mother. The poet introduces some distinguishing features of the time, such as the emery and black lead used for cleaning the stovetop, and the feeling of occasion attached to the phrase “And films no less!” (Line 13).

For the most part, however, this first memory could exist in any time at all, and it tells a simple story of a mother and a child and a young man that could stand alone in any past, present, or future. This sense of timelessness is made especially powerful by the comparison of the titular two lorries; though decades apart, there is a suggestion that the trucks have changed very little in that time, close enough to be indistinguishable in the speaker’s memory.

The later scene takes place on May 23rd, 1993, a notable date in the history of the Irish Troubles. The conflict arose between nationalist and separatist movements regarding the status of Northern Ireland; some wanted it to remain a part of the United Kingdom, while others wanted it to rejoin the Irish Republic as a united country. The Troubles, as it came to be known, began in the 1960s and continued up until the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, five years after the setting of this poem, and two years after its first publication; therefore, Northern Ireland was still embroiled in its decades-long conflict at the time of writing.

On May 23rd, 1993, the Irish Republican Army drove a lorry containing a 500-lb car bomb and parked it in front of the Ulsterbus depot on Broad Street, one of the main roads of the Northern Irish town of Magherafelt. The bus depot was demolished completely. It is estimated that nine people were killed in the explosion—certainly a senseless tragedy, but a small number compared to other attacks in Ireland and elsewhere. The imagery in the poem describes a countless number of dead to be piled into the body bags; this suggests that this aspect of the poem may have referred not only to the site of the explosion, but to the Northern Ireland conflict as a whole.

Estimates vary, but it is thought that between 3,500 and 3,700 people died nationwide as a result of the conflict, with more than 100,000 people injured. Therefore, “Two Lorries” can be seen not just as a depiction of a moment in time, but as a narrative about the senseless death and destruction of this era.