Seamus Heaney's 1979 volume of poems, Field Work, contains ten sonnets written while the Northern Irish author lived for four years in a nineteenth-century cottage near Dublin. These sonnets, dealing with art, language, nature, and politics, reflect Heaney's major themes and are typical of his poetic techniques. This study analyzes the content of the ten sonnets as well as their technical aspects.

One of the three-fold purposes of this study is to indicate the relationship between the cultural advancements of the Cherokees and the development and implementation of a written, printable language into their culture. In fulfilling a second purposes, the study emphasizes the influence of literacy on the social values of the Cherokees. The third purpose is to consider the idea of the Cherokees themselves that bi-lingual education, first in Cherokee, then in English, and a renewed national pride and productivity in literacy could go far in solving the problems of social alienation and educational negativism that exist among un-assimilated Cherokees.