The second part is the eponymous long poem "Station Island" which is broken into twelve sections. 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.'" During his pilgrimage Heaney, the protagonist of the poem, encounters ghosts from his past who engage him in dialogue. The ghosts range from victims of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, to figures from Heaney's childhood in Castledawson, to writers and poets who have greatly influenced Heaney's own poetics. The victims of sectarian violence include such figures as the shopkeeper William Strathearn (Section VII), Heaney's cousin Colum McCartney, whose murder was previously the subject of the poem "The Strand at Lough Beg" (Section VIII), and the hunger-striker and Heaney family acquaintance Francis Hughes (Section IX). Among those ghosts from his past are the traveller Simon Sweeney (Section I), his teacher at the Anahorish School, Master Murphy (Section V), and two separate unnamed priests (Section IV and XI). The 19th-century Irish author of "Lough Derg Pilgrim" William Carleton (Section II) and the poets Patrick Kavanagh and Gerard Manley Hopkins are among the literary figures in whom Heaney finds inspiration and meets on his pilgrimage (Section V). The final section of the poem, Section XII, ends with a fictional encounter between Heaney and James Joyce who, following the Dantean motif, assumes the role of Virgil. 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. / Let go, let fly, forget. You've listened long enough. Now strike your note."