Death of a Naturalist Read online

  Death of a Naturalist

  SEAMUS HEANEY

  For Marie

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Digging

  Death of a Naturalist

  The Barn

  An Advancement of Learning

  Blackberry-Picking

  Churning Day

  The Early Purges

  Follower

  Ancestral Photograph

  Mid-Term Break

  Dawn Shoot

  At a Potato Digging

  For the Commander of the Eliza

  The Diviner

  Turkeys Observed

  Cow In Calf

  Trout

  Waterfall

  Docker

  Poor Women in a City Church

  Gravities

  Twice Shy

  Valediction

  Lovers on Aran

  Poem

  Honeymoon Flight

  Scaffolding

  Storm on The Island

  Synge on Aran

  Saint Francis and the Birds

  In Small Townlands

  The Folk Singers

  The Play Way

  Personal Helicon

  Acknowledgements

  Praise

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  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 dragon-flies, 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 little 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.

  The Barn

  Threshed corn lay piled like grit of ivory

  Or solid as cement in two-lugged sacks.

  The musty dark hoarded an armoury

  Of farmyard implements, harness, plough-socks.

  The floor was mouse-grey, smooth, chilly concrete.

  There were no windows, just two narrow shafts

  Of gilded motes, crossing, from air-holes slit

  High in each gable. The one door meant no draughts

  All summer when the zinc burned like an oven.

  A scythe’s edge, a clean spade, a pitch-fork’s prongs:

  Slowly bright objects formed when you went in.

  Then you felt cobwebs clogging up your lungs

  And scuttled fast into the sunlit yard –

  And into nights when bats were on the wing

  Over the rafters of sleep, where bright eyes stared

  From piles of grain in corners, fierce, unblinking.

  The dark gulfed like a roof-space. I was chaff

  To be pecked up when birds shot through the air-slits.

  I lay face-down to shun the fear above.

  The two-lugged sacks moved in like great blind rats.

  An Advancement of Learning

  I took the embankment path

  (As always, deferring

  The bridge). The river nosed past,

  Pliable, oil-skinned, wearing

  A transfer of gables and sky.

  Hunched over the railing,

  Well away from the road now, I

  Considered the dirty-keeled swans.

  Something slobbered curtly, close,

  Smudging the silence: a rat

  Slimed out of the water and

  My throat sickened so quickly that

  I turned down the path in cold sweat

  But God, another was nimbling

  Up the far bank, tracing its wet

  Arcs on the stones. Incredibly then

  I established a dreaded

  Bridgehead. I turned to stare

  With deliberate, thrilled care

  At my hitherto snubbed rodent.

  He clockworked aimlessly a while,

  Stopped, back bunched and glistening,

  Ears plastered down on his knobbled skull,

  Insidiously listening.

  The tapered tail that followed him,

  The raindrop eye, the old snout:

  One by one I took all in.

  He trained on me. I stared him out

  Forgetting how I used to panic

  When his grey brothers scraped and fed

  Behind the hen-coop in our yard,

  On ceiling boards above my bed.

  This terror, cold, wet-furred, small-clawed,

  Retreated up a pipe for sewage.

  I stared a minute after him.

  Then I walked on and crossed the bridge.

  Black
berry-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.

  Churning Day

  A thick crust, coarse-grained as limestone rough-cast,

  hardened gradually on top of the four crocks

  that stood, large pottery bombs, in the small pantry.

  After the hot brewery of gland, cud and udder,

  cool porous earthenware fermented the buttermilk

  for churning day, when the hooped churn was scoured

  with plumping kettles and the busy scrubber

  echoed daintily on the seasoned wood.

  It stood then, purified, on the flagged kitchen floor.

  Out came the four crocks, spilled their heavy lip

  of cream, their white insides, into the sterile churn.

  The staff, like a great whisky muddler fashioned

  in deal wood, was plunged in, the lid fitted.

  My mother took first turn, set up rhythms

  that slugged and thumped for hours. Arms ached.

  Hands blistered. Cheeks and clothes were spattered

  with flabby milk.

  Where finally gold flecks

  began to dance. They poured hot water then,

  sterilized a birchwood-bowl

  and little corrugated butter-spades.

  Their short stroke quickened, suddenly

  a yellow curd was weighting the churned up white,

  heavy and rich, coagulated sunlight

  that they fished, dripping, in a wide tin strainer,

  heaped up like gilded gravel in the bowl.

  The house would stink long after churning day,

  acrid as a sulphur mine. The empty crocks

  were ranged along the wall again, the butter

  in soft printed slabs was piled on pantry shelves.

  And in the house we moved with gravid ease,

  our brains turned crystals full of clean deal churns,

  the plash and gurgle of the sour-breathed milk,

  the pat and slap of small spades on wet lumps.

  The Early Purges

  I was six when I first saw kittens drown.

  Dan Taggart pitched them, ‘the scraggy wee shits’,

  Into a bucket; a frail metal sound,

  Soft paws scraping like mad. But their tiny din

  Was soon soused. They were slung on the snout

  Of the pump and the water pumped in.

  ‘Sure isn’t it better for them now?’ Dan said.

  Like wet gloves they bobbed and shone till he sluiced

  Them out on the dunghill, glossy and dead.

  Suddenly frightened, for days I sadly hung

  Round the yard, watching the three sogged remains

  Turn mealy and crisp as old summer dung

  Until I forgot them. But the fear came back

  When Dan trapped big rats, snared rabbits, shot crows

  Or, with a sickening tug, pulled old hens’ necks.

  Still, living displaces false sentiments

  And now, when shrill pups are prodded to drown,

  I just shrug, ‘Bloody pups’. It makes sense:

  ‘Prevention of cruelty’ talk cuts ice in town

  Where they consider death unnatural,

  But on well-run farms pests have to be kept down.

  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 hob-nailed 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.

  Ancestral Photograph

  Jaws puff round and solid as a turnip,

  Dead eyes are statue’s and the upper lip

  Bullies the heavy mouth down to a droop.

  A bowler suggests the stage Irishman

  Whose look has two parts scorn, two parts dead pan.

  His silver watch chain girds him like a hoop.

  My father’s uncle, from whom he learnt the trade,

  Long fixed in sepia tints, begins to fade

  And must come down. Now on the bedroom wall

  There is a faded patch where he has been –