Station Island is the sixth collection of original poetry written by Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995.

It refers to Station Island (also known as Saint Patrick's Purgatory) on Lough Derg in County Donegal, Ireland, site of Christian pilgrimage for many centuries.

In an interview collected in Stepping Stones Heaney describes the driving force behind his writing of the long poem "Station Island": "I needed to butt my way through a blockage, a pile-up of hampering stuff, everything that had gathered up inside me because of the way I was both in an out of the Northern Ireland situation.

"[3] Heaney had thought of writing a poem based on Lough Derg since the mid-1960s but it wasn't until he read Dante in the 1970s that what would become "Station Island" started to take shape.

The experience of reading him in the 1970s was mighty, and translating the Ugolino episode [which appeared as the final poem in Field Work, the volume published prior to Station Island] was like doing press-ups, getting ready for something bigger.

While the lyrics cover a range of topics several allude to the larger theme of the collection as a whole: the question of what responsibility the poet has to bear witness to and address historical and political issues.

In "Away from it All" Heaney quotes from Czeslaw Milosz's "Native Realm" in which he writes, "I was stretched between contemplation / of a motionless point / and the command to participate / actively in history.

Describing the way in which he modeled the structure of the poem on Dante, Heaney calls it "the three-part Dantean journey scaled down into the three-day station, no hell, no paradise, just 'Patrick's Purgatory.

Joyce allows Heaney a freedom from the self-questioning stance he has assumed throughout the poem when he tells him that "the main thing is to write / for the joy of it...And don't be so earnest, // let others wear the sackcloth and the ashes.

She writes: "Heaney's voice, by turns mythological and journalistic, rural and sophisticated, reminiscent and impatient, stern and yielding, curt and expansive, is one of a suppleness almost equal to consciousness itself.