100 Poems
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.