Neil Rhodes provides an astute reading of ‘Act of Union’ in 'Bridegrooms to the Goddess’, where he notes that a longer version of the poem was published under the title ‘A New Life' in the Listener in 1973. In this version, the occasion of the poem is Marie Heaney's third pregnancy and the poem ‘ends in family peace, the crying baby calmed by mother and father, “[t]he triangle of forces solved in love” ’. Rhodes registers both the motivation for the changed ending as it appeared in North and the effect which the change has on the poem:

In the wake of Heaneys engagement with the political in North and elsewhere, the ‘admonitory whispers’ - and more directly spoken admonishing rebukes - came thick and fast.

Thus, in an article on Heaney entitled ‘The Trouble with Seamus’, James Simmons castigates the poet for offering the reader, in North, a ‘barren nationalism [that] descends into vanity and self-pity’. Edna Longley, in a more substantial consideration of Heaney's work in Poetry in the Wars, provides much the same assessment, and in a chapter of the book entitled ‘Poetry and Politics in Northern Ireland’ she suggests that ‘poetry and politics, like church and state, should be separated. And for the same reasons: mysteries distort the rational processes which ideally prevail in social relations; while ideologies confiscate the poet's special passport to terra incognita.’

For Simmons and Longley, Heaney indulges too much in politics, or rather, perhaps, indulges in politics of the wrong kind. Other commentators on Heaney's poems on the Irish conflict - especially those included in North - have, however, taken a rather different line. Desmond Fennell, for example, in a belligerent but sometimes insightful pamphlet entitled Whatever You Say, Say Nothing, observes of Heaneys poems about the North that they say ‘nothing, plainly or figuratively’