This is the third installment of my series Seeing Things. In the first installment, also titled “Seeing Things,” I discussed how the contemplative gaze can be both aesthetic and interpretive. In the second installment, “Restoration of the Demon,” I looked at the contemporary phenomenon of re-enchantment. Here, I weave the threads together.

The middle section of Seamus Heaney’s triptych “Seeing Things,” the title poem of his 1991 collection, ...