Wintering Out opens with a poem of dedication to David Hammond and the Northern Irish poet Michael Longley:

As a point of entry into Heaney's third collection of poems, this piece (later incorporated into ‘Whatever You Say Say Nothing' in North) offers us a glimpse of a very different world from the one we are introduced to on the opening page of Death of a Naturalist. Where ‘Digging’ presents us with a natural, rural world of ‘flowerbeds’, ‘potato drills’, ‘new potatoes’, ‘good turf’, and ‘living roots’ (DN 1, 2), Heaney's poem for Hammond and Longley brings us face to face with a harsh new set of realities. Northern Ireland had changed quite dramatically between 1966, when Death of a Naturalist was published, and 1972, when Wintering Out appeared, and many of these changes are registered here in this poem of dedication.

As the 1960s ended, the Northern Irish state lurched toward crisis. With the failure of the Civil Rights movement, militant republicanism (and militant unionism) revived and the province grew accustomed both to the sounds and to the consequences of bombings and shootings. As Heaney drives along the motorway (in itself something of an incongruous intrusion of the modern world into his typical poetic mise-en-scène - at least up to this point in his career), he sees the crater which a bomb has scarred into the landscape. As a result of the deepening crisis, the British Army were now deployed in the North and they, too, intrude into the scene, with their ‘machine-gun posts defin[ing] a real stockade’.