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In the course of the past decade, I have found himself looking as much to poets and the experience of reading poetry as to the work of other analysts in my ongoing effort to become a psychoanalyst. Both the poet and the psychoanalyst are individuals whose life's work is that of making >raid[s] [on] the inarticulate< (Eliot, 1940, p. 128) in their effort to delve as deeply as possible into what it is to be human and to render that experience in the medium of language. To this end, I offer a reading of Seamus Heaney's (1987) >Clearances,< an elegy Heaney wrote for his mother soon after her death. I explore the ways in which the experience of mourning – whether in a poem or in an analytic experience – is not simply >conveyed< (as if illuminating something already there) but created in the very act of writing/saying the poem or of bringing feelings to life in words in an analytic session. I begin by presenting a brief biographical account of Heaney not to >explain< his poetry in analytic terms but to allow the reader to create a more imaginative, more human reading of the poem as he or she enters into the conversation between the life of the man and the life of the poetry. Then I discuss the ways in which >Clearances< comes to life as a variety of coexisting forms of love that together shape an experience of grief.