There’s something of fairy-tale magic in this idea of writing as a thread teased out from the writer’s cupboard of experiences, unwinding like a ball of story silk. 

The writing unreels like a skein long stored in the cupboard of the senses. 

For a rich selection of other Heaney similes and metaphors, see our celebration of Beowulf, both his version and that of Kevin Crossley-Holland.

Source: Seamus Heaney, Finders Keepers: Selected prose 1971-2001 (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), p. 156

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