New Selected Poems (1988-2013) Read online

  SEAMUS HEANEY

  New Selected Poems

  1988–2013

  Publisher’s Note

  This edition reproduces selections from Seeing Things (1991) and The Spirit Level (1996) that Seamus Heaney made for Opened Ground: Poems 1966–1996. Selections from Electric Light (2001), District and Circle (2006) and Human Chain (2010) were prepared by the author for a prospective edition of his works in Italian translation. Although Seamus Heaney had not identified an extract from Beowulf (1999), he did indicate that he would wish to see it represented in that edition, and had previously chosen passages from the opening and closing sections included here. ‘In Time’, Seamus Heaney’s last poem, appears here in accordance with the wishes of his family.

  The Heaney family would like to extend their gratitude to Marco Sonzogni for his help in producing this edition

  Contents

  Title Page

  Publisher’s Note

  Epigraph

  from Seeing Things (1991)

  The Golden Bough

  Markings

  Man and Boy

  Seeing Things

  An August Night

  Field of Vision

  The Pitchfork

  The Settle Bed

  from Glanmore Revisited

  I Scrabble

  II The Cot

  V Lustral Sonnet

  VII The Skylight

  A Pillowed Head

  A Royal Prospect

  Wheels within Wheels

  Fosterling

  from Squarings

  Lightenings

  Settings

  Crossings

  Squarings

  from The Spirit Level (1996)

  The Rain Stick

  Mint

  A Sofa in the Forties

  Keeping Going

  Two Lorries

  Damson

  Weighing In

  St Kevin and the Blackbird

  from The Flight Path

  Mycenae Lookout

  1 The Watchman’s War

  2 Cassandra

  3 His Dawn Vision

  4 The Nights

  5 His Reverie of Water

  The Gravel Walks

  Whitby-sur-Moyola

  ‘Poet’s Chair’

  The Swing

  Two Stick Drawings

  A Call

  The Errand

  A Dog Was Crying Tonight in Wicklow Also

  The Strand

  The Walk

  At the Wellhead

  At Banagher

  Tollund

  Postscript

  from Beowulf (1999)

  [lines 1–163]

  [lines 3137–3182]

  from Electric Light (2001)

  Perch

  Lupins

  from Out of the Bag

  The Little Canticles of Asturias

  Ballynahinch Lake

  The Clothes Shrine

  Glanmore Eclogue

  Sonnets from Hellas

  1 Into Arcadia

  2 Conkers

  3 Pylos

  4 The Augean Stables

  5 Castalian Spring

  6 Desfina

  Vitruviana

  Audenesque

  To the Shade of Zbigniew Herbert

  Bodies and Souls

  1 In the Afterlife

  2 Nights of ’57

  3 The Bereaved

  from Electric Light

  from District and Circle (2006)

  A Shiver

  Anahorish 1944

  Anything Can Happen

  District and Circle

  Wordsworth’s Skates

  Found Prose

  1 The Lagans Road

  2 Tall Dames

  3 Boarders

  The Lift

  Nonce Words

  Stern

  from Out of This World

  1 ‘Like everybody else …’

  In Iowa

  Höfn

  The Tollund Man in Springtime

  Planting the Alder

  Tate’s Avenue

  Fiddleheads

  Quitting Time

  The Blackbird of Glanmore

  from Human Chain (2010)

  ‘Had I not been awake’

  Album

  The Conway Stewart

  Uncoupled

  The Butts

  Chanson d’Aventure

  Miracle

  Human Chain

  The Baler

  Eelworks

  The Riverbank Field

  Route 110

  Wraiths

  I Sidhe

  II Parking Lot

  III White Nights

  ‘The door was open and the house was dark’

  In the Attic

  A Kite for Aibhín

  In Time (2013)

  Index

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  NEW SELECTED POEMS

  1988–2013

  The Golden Bough

  from Virgil, Aeneid, vi

  Aeneas was praying and holding on to the altar

  When the prophetess started to speak: ‘Blood relation of gods,

  Trojan, son of Anchises, the way down to Avernus is easy.

  Day and night black Pluto’s door stands open.

  But to retrace your steps and get back to upper air,

  This is the real task and the real undertaking.

  A few have been able to do it, sons of the gods

  Favoured by Jupiter Justus, or exalted to heaven

  In a blaze of heroic glory. Forests spread half-way down

  And Cocytus winds through the dark, licking its banks.

  Still, if love torments you so much and you so much desire

  To sail the Stygian lake twice and twice to inspect

  The underworld dark, if you must go beyond what’s permitted,

  Understand what you must do beforehand.

  Hidden in the thick of a tree is a bough made of gold

  And its leaves and pliable twigs are made of it too.

  It is sacred to underworld Juno, who is its patron,

  And overtopped by a grove where deep shadows mass

  Along far wooded valleys. No one is ever permitted

  To go down into earth’s hidden places unless he has first

  Plucked this golden-fledged tree-branch out of its tree

  And bestowed it on fair Proserpina, to whom it belongs

  By decree, her own special gift. And when it is plucked

  A second one grows in its place, golden once more,

  And the foliage growing upon it glimmers the same.

  Therefore look up and search deep and when you have found it

  Take hold of it boldly and duly. If fate has called you

  The bough will come away easily, of its own sweet accord.

  Otherwise, no matter how much strength you muster, you won’t

  Ever manage to quell it or fell it with the toughest of blades.’

  Markings

  I

  We marked the pitch: four jackets for four goalposts,

  That was all. The corners and the squares

  Were there like longitude and latitude

  Under the bumpy ground, to be

  Agreed about or disagreed about

  When the time came. And then we picked the teams

  And crossed the line our called names drew between us.

  Youngsters shouting their heads off in a field

  As the light died and they kept on playing

  Because by then they were playing in their heads

  And the actual kicked ball came to them

  Like a dream heaviness, and their own
hard

  Breathing in the dark and skids on grass

  Sounded like effort in another world …

  It was quick and constant, a game that never need

  Be played out. Some limit had been passed,

  There was fleetness, furtherance, untiredness

  In time that was extra, unforeseen and free.

  II

  You also loved lines pegged out in the garden,

  The spade nicking the first straight edge along

  The tight white string. Or string stretched perfectly

  To make the outline of a house foundation,

  Pale timber battens set at right angles

  For every corner, each freshly sawn new board

  Spick and span in the oddly passive grass.

  Or the imaginary line straight down

  A field of grazing, to be ploughed open

  From the rod stuck in one headrig to the rod

  Stuck in the other.

  III

  All these things entered you

  As if they were both the door and what came through it.

  They marked the spot, marked time and held it open.

  A mower parted the bronze sea of corn.

  A windlass hauled the centre out of water.

  Two men with a cross-cut kept it swimming

  Into a felled beech backwards and forwards

  So that they seemed to row the steady earth.

  Man and Boy

  I

  ‘Catch the old one first,’

  (My father’s joke was also old, and heavy

  And predictable). ‘Then the young ones

  Will all follow, and Bob’s your uncle.’

  On slow bright river evenings, the sweet time

  Made him afraid we’d take too much for granted

  And so our spirits must be lightly checked.

  Blessed be down-to-earth! Blessed be highs!

  Blessed be the detachment of dumb love

  In that broad-backed, low-set man

  Who feared debt all his life, but now and then

  Could make a splash like the salmon he said was

  ‘As big as a wee pork pig by the sound of it’.

  II

  In earshot of the pool where the salmon jumped

  Back through its own unheard concentric soundwaves

  A mower leans forever on his scythe.

  He has mown himself to the centre of the field

  And stands in a final perfect ring

  Of sunlit stubble.

  ‘Go and tell your father,’ the mower says

  (He said it to my father who told me),

  ‘I have it mowed as clean as a new sixpence.’

  My father is a barefoot boy with news,

  Running at eye-level with weeds and stooks

  On the afternoon of his own father’s death.

  The open, black half of the half-door waits.

  I feel much heat and hurry in the air.

  I feel his legs and quick heels far away

  And strange as my own – when he will piggyback me

  At a great height, light-headed and thin-boned,

  Like a witless elder rescued from the fire.

  Seeing Things

  I

  Inishbofin on a Sunday morning.

  Sunlight, turfsmoke, seagulls, boatslip, diesel.

  One by one we were being handed down

  Into a boat that dipped and shilly-shallied

  Scaresomely every time. We sat tight

  On short cross-benches, in nervous twos and threes,

  Obedient, newly close, nobody speaking

  Except the boatmen, as the gunwales sank

  And seemed they might ship water any minute.

  The sea was very calm but even so,

  When the engine kicked and our ferryman

  Swayed for balance, reaching for the tiller,

  I panicked at the shiftiness and heft

  Of the craft itself. What guaranteed us –

  That quick response and buoyancy and swim –

  Kept me in agony. All the time

  As we went sailing evenly across

  The deep, still, seeable-down-into water,

  It was as if I looked from another boat

  Sailing through air, far up, and could see

  How riskily we fared into the morning,

  And loved in vain our bare, bowed, numbered heads.

  II

  Claritas. The dry-eyed Latin word

  Is perfect for the carved stone of the water

  Where Jesus stands up to his unwet knees

  And John the Baptist pours out more water

  Over his head: all this in bright sunlight

  On the façade of a cathedral. Lines

  Hard and thin and sinuous represent

  The flowing river. Down between the lines

  Little antic fish are all go. Nothing else.

  And yet in that utter visibility

  The stone’s alive with what’s invisible:

  Waterweed, stirred sand-grains hurrying off,

  The shadowy, unshadowed stream itself.

  All afternoon, heat wavered on the steps

  And the air we stood up to our eyes in wavered

  Like the zig-zag hieroglyph for life itself.

  III

  Once upon a time my undrowned father

  Walked into our yard. He had gone to spray

  Potatoes in a field on the riverbank

  And wouldn’t bring me with him. The horse-sprayer

  Was too big and new-fangled, bluestone might

  Burn me in the eyes, the horse was fresh, I

  Might scare the horse, and so on. I threw stones

  At a bird on the shed roof, as much for

  The clatter of the stones as anything,

  But when he came back, I was inside the house

  And saw him out the window, scatter-eyed

  And daunted, strange without his hat,

  His step unguided, his ghosthood immanent.

  When he was turning on the riverbank,

  The horse had rusted and reared up and pitched

  Cart and sprayer and everything off balance

  So the whole rig went over into a deep

  Whirlpool, hoofs, chains, shafts, cartwheels, barrel

  And tackle, all tumbling off the world,

  And the hat already merrily swept along

  The quieter reaches. That afternoon

  I saw him face to face, he came to me

  With his damp footprints out of the river,

  And there was nothing between us there

  That might not still be happily ever after.

  An August Night

  His hands were warm and small and knowledgeable.

  When I saw them again last night, they were two ferrets,

  Playing all by themselves in a moonlit field.

  Field of Vision

  I remember this woman who sat for years

  In a wheelchair, looking straight ahead

  Out the window at sycamore trees unleafing

  And leafing at the far end of the lane.

  Straight out past the TV in the corner,

  The stunted, agitated hawthorn bush,

  The same small calves with their backs to wind and rain,

  The same acre of ragwort, the same mountain.

  She was steadfast as the big window itself.

  Her brow was clear as the chrome bits of the chair.

  She never lamented once and she never

  Carried a spare ounce of emotional weight.

  Face to face with her was an education

  Of the sort you got across a well-braced gate –

  One of those lean, clean, iron, roadside ones

  Between two whitewashed pillars, where you could see

  Deeper into the country than you expected

  And discovered that the field behind the hedge

  Grew more distinctly strange as you kept standing


  Focused and drawn in by what barred the way.

  The Pitchfork

  Of all implements, the pitchfork was the one

  That came near to an imagined perfection:

  When he tightened his raised hand and aimed with it,

  It felt like a javelin, accurate and light.

  So whether he played the warrior or the athlete

  Or worked in earnest in the chaff and sweat,

  He loved its grain of tapering, dark-flecked ash

  Grown satiny from its own natural polish.

  Riveted steel, turned timber, burnish, grain,

  Smoothness, straightness, roundness, length and sheen.

  Sweat-cured, sharpened, balanced, tested, fitted.

  The springiness, the clip and dart of it.

  And then when he thought of probes that reached the farthest,

  He would see the shaft of a pitchfork sailing past

  Evenly, imperturbably through space,

  Its prongs starlit and absolutely soundless –

  But has learned at last to follow that simple lead

  Past its own aim, out to an other side

  Where perfection – or nearness to it – is imagined

  Not in the aiming but the opening hand.

  The Settle Bed

  Willed down, waited for, in place at last and for good.

  Trunk-hasped, cart-heavy, painted an ignorant brown.

  And pew-strait, bin-deep, standing four-square as an ark.

  If I lie in it, I am cribbed in seasoned deal

  Dry as the unkindled boards of a funeral ship.

  My measure has been taken, my ear shuttered up.

  Yet I hear an old sombre tide awash in the headboard:

  Unpathetic och ochs and och hohs, the long bedtime

  Sigh-life of Ulster, unwilling, unbeaten,

  Protestant, Catholic, the Bible, the beads,

  Late talks at gables by moonlight, boots on the hearth,