Another maritime metaphor in Heaney’s introduction to a poem set in a sea-world.  The ‘big quay’ of language and literature can be a powerful deterrent to even building one’s little craft, let alone docking it at the quay. That’s where the current of creativity can help, the inner compulsion to make something manifest which, if strong enough, can overcome such fears.

’… some sense that your own little verse-craft can dock safe and sound at the big quay of the language’.

Source: Beowulf, Seamus Heaney (London: Faber & Faber, 2000 (1999)), p. xxvi