Peter McDonald has observed of Seeing Things that it ‘represents [Heaney's] most sustained attempt to achieve imaginative liftoff into a kind of poetry less constrained by identities (Irish or otherwise) and more openly metaphysical in its concerns’. While this is undoubtedly true, it is also the case that the volume which immediately followed Seeing Things - The Spirit Level (1996) - offered something like a spiralling back to a number of Heaneys traditional poetic themes and interests. This is not exactly a case of a Freudian ‘return of the repressed’, but it is nevertheless true, as Neil Corcoran has argued, that The Spirit Level relocates Heaney's work ‘very vividly [in] those social, historical and political contingencies which it appeared a large part of the effort of Seeing Things to raise itself clear of’.

The historical and political contingencies which Corcoran points to can vividly be seen re-emerging in a poem such as ‘The Flight Path’, where a figure out of Heaney's personal and political past irrupts into the scene of the poem. Section 4 of ‘The Flight Path’ is set in 1979 - the year Heaney had his first experience of teaching at Harvard. Having just flown from New York to Dublin, he is seated on a train bound for Belfast, enjoying the ‘Plain, simple / Exhilaration at being back’ (SL 24), when a ‘grimfaced' figure enters the scene. The poet had once dreamed that this man - a childhood schoolfriend - had solicited his help in blowing up a customs post on the Irish border, attempting to draw him into a cosy friendly conspiracy of violent destruction. Once Heaney had parked the explosives-laden van, he simply needed to walk on down the road to another vehicle:

The episode of the proxy-bomb is no more than a dream, but on the journey to Belfast the grimfaced schoolfriend is a real presence, berating Heaney for his failure to write a clearly partisan poetry that registers a definite solidarity with his own community: ‘When, for fuck's sake, are you going to write / Something for us?’ (SL 25).