Selected Poems 1966-1987 Read online

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  FROM

  Death of a Naturalist

  (1966)

  Digging

  Death of a Naturalist

  Blackberry-Picking

  Follower

  Mid-Term Break

  Poem

  Personal Helicon

  FROM

  Door into the Dark

  (1969)

  Thatcher

  The Peninsula

  Requiem for the Croppies

  The Wife’s Tale

  Night Drive

  Relic of Memory

  Bogland

  FROM

  Wintering Out

  (1972)

  Bog Oak

  Anahorish

  Gifts of Rain

  Broagh

  Oracle

  A New Song

  The Other Side

  The Tollund Man

  Wedding Day

  Summer Home

  Limbo

  Bye-Child

  Westering

  FROM

  Stations

  (1975)

  Nesting-Ground

  England’s Difficulty

  Visitant

  Trial Runs

  Cloistered

  The Stations of the West

  Incertus

  FROM

  North

  (1975)

  Mossbawn

  1. Sunlight

  2. The Seed Cutters

  Funeral Rites

  North

  Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces

  Bone Dreams

  Bog Queen

  The Grauballe Man

  Punishment

  Strange Fruit

  Act of Union

  Hercules and Antaeus

  From Whatever You Say Say Nothing

  From Singing School

  1. The Ministry of Fear

  2. A Constable Calls

  4. Summer 1969

  5. Fosterage

  6. Exposure

  FROM

  Field Work

  (1979)

  Oysters

  Triptych

  I. After a Killing

  II. Sibyl

  III. At the Water’s Edge

  The Toome Road

  A Drink of Water

  The Strand at Lough Beg

  Casualty

  The Badgers

  The Singer’s House

  The Guttural Muse

  Glanmore Sonnets

  An Afterwards

  The Otter

  The Skunk

  A Dream of Jealousy

  From Field Work

  Song

  The Harvest Bow

  In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge

  FROM

  Sweeney Astray

  (1983)

  Sweeney Praises the Trees

  Sweeney Astray

  Sweeney’s Lament on Ailsa Craig

  Sweeney in Connacht

  Sweeney’s Last Poem

  FROM

  Station Island

  (1984)

  The Underground

  Sloe Gin

  Chekhov on Sakhalin

  Sandstone Keepsake

  From Shelf Life

  Granite Chip

  Old Smoothing Iron

  Stone from Delphi

  Making Strange

  A Hazel Stick for Catherine Ann

  A Kite for Michael and Christopher

  The Railway Children

  The King of the Ditchbacks

  Station Island

  From Sweeney Redivivus

  In the Beech

  The First Kingdom

  The First Flight

  Drifting Off

  The Cleric

  The Master

  The Scribes

  Holly

  An Artist

  In Illo Tempore

  On the Road

  FROM

  The Haw Lantern

  (1987)

  Alphabets

  Terminus

  From the Frontier of Writing

  The Haw Lantern

  From the Republic of Conscience

  Hailstones

  The Stone Verdict

  The Spoonbait

  Clearances

  The Milk Factory

  The Wishing Tree

  Wolfe Tone

  From the Canton of Expectation

  The Mud Vision

  The Disappearing Island

  Notes

  Index of Titles

  Index of First Lines

  Books by Seamus Heaney

  Copyright

  For Marie and Michael and Christopher and Catherine Ann

  FROM

  Death of a Naturalist

  (1966)

  Digging

  Between my finger and my thumb

  The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

  Under my window, a clean rasping sound

  When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:

  My father, digging. I look down

  Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds

  Bends low, comes up twenty years away

  Stooping in rhythm through potato drills

  Where he was digging.

  The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft

  Against the inside knee was levered firmly.

  He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep

  To scatter new potatoes that we picked

  Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

  By God, the old man could handle a spade.

  Just like his old man.

  My grandfather cut more turf in a day

  Than any other man on Toner’s bog.

  Once I carried him milk in a bottle

  Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up

  To drink it, then fell to right away

  Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods

  Over his shoulder, going down and down

  For the good turf. Digging.

  The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

  Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

  Through living roots awaken in my head.

  But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

  Between my finger and my thumb

  The squat pen rests.

  I’ll dig with it.

  Death of a Naturalist

  All year the flax-dam festered in the heart

  Of the townland; green and heavy-headed

  Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.

  Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.

  Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles

  Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.

  There were dragonflies, spotted butterflies,

  But best of all was the warm thick slobber

  Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water

  In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring

  I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied

  Specks to range on window-sills at home,

  On shelves at school, and wait and watch until

  The fattening dots burst into nimble-

  Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how

  The daddy frog was called a bullfrog

  And how he croaked and how the mammy frog

  Laid hundreds of litt
le eggs and this was

  Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too

  For they were yellow in the sun and brown

  In rain.

  Then one hot day when fields were rank

  With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs

  Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges

  To a coarse croaking that I had not heard

  Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.

  Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked

  On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:

  The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat

  Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.

  I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings

  Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew

  That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.

  Blackberry-Picking

  For Philip Hobsbaum

  Late August, given heavy rain and sun

  For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.

  At first, just one, a glossy purple clot

  Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.

  You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet

  Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it

  Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for

  Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger

  Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam pots

  Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.

  Round hayfields, cornfields and potato drills

  We trekked and picked until the cans were full,

  Until the tinkling bottom had been covered

  With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned

  Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered

  With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard’s.

  We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.

  But when the bath was filled we found a fur,

  A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.

  The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush

  The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.

  I always felt like crying. It wasn’t fair

  That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.

  Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not.

  Follower

  My father worked with a horse-plough,

  His shoulders globed like a full sail strung

  Between the shafts and the furrow.

  The horses strained at his clicking tongue.

  An expert. He would set the wing

  And fit the bright steel-pointed sock.

  The sod rolled over without breaking.

  At the headrig, with a single pluck

  Of reins, the sweating team turned round

  And back into the land. His eye

  Narrowed and angled at the ground,

  Mapping the furrow exactly.

  I stumbled in his hobnailed wake,

  Fell sometimes on the polished sod;

  Sometimes he rode me on his back

  Dipping and rising to his plod.

  I wanted to grow up and plough,

  To close one eye, stiffen my arm.

  All I ever did was follow

  In his broad shadow round the farm.

  I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,

  Yapping always. But today

  It is my father who keeps stumbling

  Behind me, and will not go away.

  Mid-Term Break

  I sat all morning in the college sick bay

  Counting bells knelling classes to a close.

  At two o’clock our neighbours drove me home.

  In the porch I met my father crying—

  He had always taken funerals in his stride—

  And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

  The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram

  When I came in, and I was embarrassed

  By old men standing up to shake my hand

  And tell me they were ‘sorry for my trouble’.

  Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,

  Away at school, as my mother held my hand

  In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.

  At ten o’clock the ambulance arrived

  With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

  Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops

  And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him

  For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

  Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,

  He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.

  No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

  A four-foot box, a foot for every year.

  Poem

  For Marie

  Love, I shall perfect for you the child

  Who diligently potters in my brain

  Digging with heavy spade till sods were piled

  Or puddling through muck in a deep drain.

  Yearly I would sow my yard-long garden.

  I’d strip a layer of sods to build the wall

  That was to keep out sow and pecking hen.

  Yearly, admitting these, the sods would fall.

  Or in the sucking clabber I would splash

  Delightedly and dam the flowing drain

  But always my bastions of clay and mush

  Would burst before the rising autumn rain.

  Love, you shall perfect for me this child

  Whose small imperfect limits would keep breaking:

  Within new limits now, arrange the world

  And square the circle: four walls and a ring.

  Personal Helicon

  For Michael Longley

  As a child, they could not keep me from wells

  And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.

  I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells

  Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

  One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.

  I savoured the rich crash when a bucket

  Plummeted down at the end of a rope.

  So deep you saw no reflection in it.

  A shallow one under a dry stone ditch

  Fructified like any aquarium.

  When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch

  A white face hovered over the bottom.

  Others had echoes, gave back your own call

  With a clean new music in it. And one

  Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall

  Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.

  Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,

  To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring

  Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme

  To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

  FROM

  Door into the Dark

  (1969)

  Thatcher

  Bespoke for weeks, he turned up some morning

  Unexpectedly, his bicycle slung

  With a light ladder and a bag of knives.

  He eyed the old rigging, poked at the eaves,

  Opened and handled sheaves of lashed wheat-straw.

  Next, the bundled rods: hazel and willow

  Were flicked for weight, twisted in case they’d snap.

  It seemed he spent the morning warming up:

  Then fixed the ladder, laid out well-honed blades

  And snipped at straw and sharpened ends of rods

  That, bent in two, made a white-pronged staple

  For pinning down his world, handful by handful.

  Couchant for days on sods above the rafters,

  He shaved and flushed the butts, stitched all together

  Into a sloped honeycomb, a stubble patch,

  And left them gaping at his Midas touch.

  The Peninsula

  When you have nothing more to say, just drive

  For a day all round the pe
ninsula.

  The sky is tall as over a runway,

  The land without marks so you will not arrive

  But pass through, though always skirting landfall.

  At dusk, horizons drink down sea and hill,

  The ploughed field swallows the whitewashed gable

  And you’re in the dark again. Now recall

  The glazed foreshore and silhouetted log,

  That rock where breakers shredded into rags,

  The leggy birds stilted on their own legs,

  Islands riding themselves out into the fog

  And drive back home, still with nothing to say

  Except that now you will uncode all landscapes

  By this: things founded clean on their own shapes,

  Water and ground in their extremity.

  Requiem for the Croppies

  The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley—

  No kitchens on the run, no striking camp—

  We moved quick and sudden in our own country.

  The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp.

  A people, hardly marching—on the hike—

  We found new tactics happening each day:

  We’d cut through reins and rider with the pike

  And stampede cattle into infantry,

  Then retreat through hedges where cavalry must be thrown.

  Until, on Vinegar Hill, the fatal conclave.

  Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.

  The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.

  They buried us without shroud or coffin

  And in August the barley grew up out of the grave.

  The Wife’s Tale

  When I had spread it all on linen cloth

  Under the hedge, I called them over.

  The hum and gulp of the thresher ran down

  And the big belt slewed to a standstill, straw

  Hanging undelivered in the jaws.

  There was such quiet that I heard their boots

  Crunching the stubble twenty yards away.

  He lay down and said ‘Give these fellows theirs,

  I’m in no hurry,’ plucking grass in handfuls

  And tossing it in the air. ‘That looks well.’

  (He nodded at my white cloth on the grass.)

  ‘I declare a woman could lay out a field

  Though boys like us have little call for cloths.’

  He winked, then watched me as I poured a cup

  And buttered the thick slices that he likes.

  ‘It’s threshing better than I thought, and mind

  It’s good clean seed. Away over there and look.’

  Always this inspection has to be made

  Even when I don’t know what to look for.