100 Poems Read online

  Seamus Heaney

  100 POEMS

  Contents

  Title Page

  Family Note

  Digging

  Death of a Naturalist

  Blackberry-Picking

  Follower

  Mid-Term Break

  The Diviner

  Twice Shy

  Scaffolding

  Personal Helicon

  The Forge

  The Peninsula

  Requiem for the Croppies

  Night Drive

  The Given Note

  Bogland

  Anahorish

  Broagh

  The Other Side

  The Tollund Man

  Wedding Day

  Westering

  Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication

  1 Sunlight

  2 The Seed Cutters

  Funeral Rites

  The Grauballe Man

  Punishment

  from Whatever You Say Say Nothing

  from Singing School

  1 The Ministry of Fear

  2 A Constable Calls

  4 Summer 1969

  6 Exposure

  Oysters

  A Drink of Water

  The Strand at Lough Beg

  Casualty

  The Singer’s House

  Elegy

  from Glanmore Sonnets

  II

  VII

  The Otter

  The Skunk

  Song

  The Harvest Bow

  In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge

  The Underground

  A Hazel Stick for Catherine Ann

  A Kite for Michael and Christopher

  The Railway Children

  from Station Island

  VII

  XII

  Alphabets

  The Haw Lantern

  From the Republic of Conscience

  The Stone Verdict

  from Clearances

  3

  7

  The Wishing Tree

  from The Cure at Troy

  Markings

  Seeing Things

  1. I. 87

  Field of Vision

  from Glanmore Revisited

  VII The Skylight

  A Pillowed Head

  Fosterling

  from Lightenings

  viii

  from Crossings

  xxvii

  The Rain Stick

  A Sofa in the Forties

  Keeping Going

  Two Lorries

  St Kevin and the Blackbird

  The Gravel Walks

  A Call

  A Dog Was Crying Tonight in Wicklow Also

  At the Wellhead

  At Banagher

  Postscript

  from Out of the Bag

  The Clothes Shrine

  from Sonnets from Hellas

  1 Into Arcadia

  Anahorish 1944

  Anything Can Happen

  Helmet

  District and Circle

  Midnight Anvil

  The Lift

  Höfn

  Tate’s Avenue

  The Blackbird of Glanmore

  ‘Had I not been awake’

  The Conway Stewart

  Chanson d’Aventure

  Miracle

  Human Chain

  from Route 110

  ‘The door was open and the house was dark’

  In the Attic

  A Kite for Aibhín

  In Time

  Index

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  Family Note

  The idea for this collection of one hundred poems is not a new one. My father himself had contemplated such a book, particularly in later years, and had gone as far as discussing it with his editor and close confidants. The notion of a ‘trim’ selection appealed to him, and while he had chosen and edited Selected Poems 1965–1975, New Selected Poems 1966–1987 and Opened Ground: Poems 1966–1996 – as well as many editions in translation – no single volume existed representing the entire sweep of his career, from first collection to last.

  Now, almost five years after his death, we, his immediate family, have returned to that idea. By its very nature, this is a different selection from the one Dad might have made – or an independent editor, for that matter. We took the decision to draw from the twelve original collections (with two exceptions) and leave aside his translations of Sweeney Astray, Beowulf and others. It includes many of his best-loved and most celebrated poems, as well as others that were among his favourites to read and which conjure up that much-missed voice. However, we also made some choices that have special resonance for us individually: evocations of departed friends; remembered moments from a long-ago holiday; familiar objects from our family home. Each one of us – my mother Marie, my brothers Michael and Christopher, and I – approached the task with a lifetime’s memories, no one more so than my mother, who had to choose from a trove of love poems spanning fifty years. Perhaps inevitably, the resulting selection is imbued with personal recollections of our shared lives.

  Yet we hope that everyone will find something here to cherish or be surprised by: that a newcomer will enjoy reading these poems for the first time, and that the long-time devotee might rediscover a forgotten favourite or simply listen again to the poetic voice as it changes and matures over the course of the years. Indeed, many readers will come to this book with their own particular memories and associations – of times when a poem helped to mark a moment of joy, perhaps, or offered consolation.

  Finally, rather than being an ‘in memoriam’ volume, this collection is intended as a celebration of the extraordinary person who gave us these poems. He himself once said that he had begun to think of life as ‘a series of ripples widening out from an original centre’; we hope this book serves as a reminder of the power and vitality of his work, and a testament to its continuing life, rippling outwards with every new reader.

  CATHERINE HEANEY

  100 POEMS

  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 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.

  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.

  The Diviner

  Cut from the green hedge a forked hazel stick

  That he held tight by the arms of the V:

  Circling the terrain, hunting the pluck

  Of water, nervous, but professionally

  Unfussed. The pluck came sharp as a sting.

  The rod jerked with precise convulsions,

  Spring water suddenly broadcasting

  Through a green hazel its secret stations.

  The bystanders would ask to have a try.

  He handed them the rod without a word.

  It lay dead in their grasp till, nonchalantly,

  He gripped expectant wrists. The hazel stirred.

  Twice Shy

  Her scarf à la Bardot,

  In suede flats for the walk,

  She came with me one evening

  For air and friendly talk.

  We crossed the quiet river,

  Took the embankment walk.

  Traffic holding its breath,

  Sky a tense diaphragm:

  Dusk hung like a backcloth

  That shook where a swan swam,

  Tremulous as a hawk

  Hanging deadly, calm.

  A vacuum of need

  Collapsed each hunting heart

  But tremulously we held

  As hawk and prey apart,

  Preserved classic decorum,

  Deployed our talk with art.

  Our juvenilia

  Had taught us both to wait,

  Not to publish feeling

  And regret it all too late –

  Mushroom loves already

  Had puffed and burst in hate.

  So, chary and excited

  As a thrush linked on a hawk,

  We thrilled to the March twilight

  With nervous childish talk:

  Still waters running deep

  Along the embankment walk.

  Scaffolding

  Masons, when they start upon a building,

  Are careful to test out the scaffolding;

  Make sure that planks won’t slip at busy points,

  Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints.

  And yet all this comes down when the job’s done,

  Showing off walls of sure and solid stone.

  So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to be

  Old bridges break
ing between you and me,

  Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall,

  Confident that we have built our wall.

  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.

  The Forge

  All I know is a door into the dark.

  Outside, old axles and iron hoops rusting;

  Inside, the hammered anvil’s short-pitched ring,

  The unpredictable fantail of sparks

  Or hiss when a new shoe toughens in water.

  The anvil must be somewhere in the centre,

  Horned as a unicorn, at one end square,

  Set there immoveable: an altar

  Where he expends himself in shape and music.