The poem begins as the speaker is pulling up to their house. This poem takes place at Seamus Heaney’s home of Glanmore, County Wicklow, a natural landscape which strongly influenced his creative work. Although it’s not the same place where the speaker grew up (and where the young child was lost), it has enough similarities in common to trigger their descent into memory. In this space, the blackbird and the speaker are equally at home; this suggests a slow return to the natural world, as the body returns to the earth when it dies. The unification of these two spaces through the lens of memory also suggests a sense of coming home, another parallel to mortality and death.