Heaney gave the graduates two images to carry into their lives. The first was Terminus, the Roman god of boundaries, whose statue was kept in the Temple of Jupiter at a point where the temple was deliberately unroofed — 'open constantly to the sky.' Even the god whose entire purpose was to mark limits refused to accept that limits were everything. Heaney had a personal connection to this figure: as someone from Northern Ireland, where borders had 'created divisions, not only within the national territory, but within the national psyche,' he had 'always been interested in this god of the borderline.' The image was his answer to the graduating class's anxiety about standing at a boundary between the known past and the unknowable future. He quoted Hamlet: 'You can be bounded in a nutshell and yet count yourself king of infinite space.' The message was that the in-between condition — between earthy origin and angelic potential — was 'not to be regarded as a disabling confusion but a necessary state.'