Both Uses of
callous
in
Crediting Poetry, by Seamus Heaney
- The violence from below was then productive of nothing but a retaliatory violence from above, the dream of justice became subsumed into the callousness of reality, and people settled in to a quarter century of life-waste and spirit —waste, of hardening attitudes and narrowing possibilities that were the natural result of political solidarity, traumatic suffering and sheer emotional self-protectiveness.†
callousness = insensitivity (emotionally)
- The callousness of those spear shafts on the woman's back and shoulders survives time and translation.†
*
Definitions:
-
(1)
(callous) heartless (cruel lack of concern for other's feelings)
or an alternative spelling for callus--thickened skin that comes from rubbing as when having calluses on the hands from doing much work with a shovel - (2) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)