Selected Poems 1966-1987

by Seamus Heaney

  heavy, earth-drawn, all mouth and eye,

  the sunflower, dreaming umber.

  IV

  Catpiss smell,

  the pink bloom open:

  I press a leaf

  of the flowering currant

  on the back of your hand

  for the tight slow burn

  of its sticky juice

  to prime your skin,

  and your veins to be crossed

  criss-cross with leaf-veins.

  I lick my thumb

  and dip it in mould,

  I anoint the anointed

  leaf-shape. Mould

  blooms and pigments

  the back of your hand

  like a birthmark—

  my umber one,

  you are stained, stained

  to perfection.

  Song

  A rowan like a lipsticked girl.

  Between the by-road and the main road

  Alder trees at a wet and dripping distance

  Stand off among the rushes.

  There are the mud-flowers of dialect

  And the immortelles of perfect pitch

  And that moment when the bird sings very close

  To the music of what happens.

  The Harvest Bow

  As you plaited the harvest bow

  You implicated the mellowed silence in you

  In wheat that does not rust

  But brightens as it tightens twist by twist

  Into a knowable corona,

  A throwaway love-knot of straw.

  Hands that aged round ash plants and cane sticks

  And lapped the spurs on a lifetime of gamecocks

  Harked to their gift and worked with fine intent

  Until your fingers moved somnambulant:

  I tell and finger it like braille,

  Gleaning the unsaid off the palpable,

  And if I spy into its golden loops

  I see us walk between the railway slopes

  Into an evening of long grass and midges,

  Blue smoke straight up, old beds and ploughs in hedges,

  An auction notice on an outhouse wall—

  You with a harvest bow in your lapel,

  Me with the fishing rod, already homesick

  For the big lift of these evenings, as your stick

  Whacking the tips off weeds and bushes

  Beats out of time, and beats, but flushes

  Nothing: that original townland

  Still tongue-tied in the straw tied by your hand.

  The end of art is peace

  Could be the motto of this frail device

  That I have pinned up on our deal dresser—

  Like a drawn snare

  Slipped lately by the spirit of the corn

  Yet burnished by its passage, and still warm.

  In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge

  Killed in France 31 July 1917

  The bronze soldier hitches a bronze cape

  That crumples stiffly in imagined wind

  No matter how the real winds buff and sweep

  His sudden hunkering run, forever craned

  Over Flanders. Helmet and haversack,

  The gun’s firm slope from butt to bayonet,

  The loyal, fallen names on the embossed plaque—

  It all meant little to the worried pet

  I was in nineteen forty-six or seven,

  Gripping my Aunt Mary by the hand

  Along the Portstewart prom, then round the crescent

  To thread the Castle Walk out to the strand.

  The pilot from Coleraine sailed to the coal-boat.

  Courting couples rose out of the scooped dunes.

  A farmer stripped to his studs and shiny waistcoat

  Rolled the trousers down on his timid shins.

  Francis Ledwidge, you courted at the seaside

  Beyond Drogheda one Sunday afternoon.

  Literary, sweet-talking, countrified,

  You pedalled out the leafy road from Slane

  Where you belonged, among the dolorous

  And lovely: the May altar of wild flowers,

  Easter water sprinkled in outhouses,

  Mass-rocks and hill-top raths and raftered byres.

  I think of you in your Tommy’s uniform,

  A haunted Catholic face, pallid and brave,

  Ghosting the trenches like a bloom of hawthorn

  Or silence cored from a Boyne passage-grave.

  It’s summer, nineteen-fifteen. I see the girl

  My aunt was then, herding on the long acre.

  Behind a low bush in the Dardanelles

  You suck stones to make your dry mouth water.

  It’s nineteen-seventeen. She still herds cows

  But a big strafe puts the candles out in Ypres:

  ‘My soul is by the Boyne, cutting new meadows …

  My country wears her confirmation dress.’

  ‘To be called a British soldier while my country

  Has no place among nations…’ You were rent

  By shrapnel six weeks later. ‘I am sorry

  That party politics should divide our tents.’

  In you, our dead enigma, all the strains

  Criss-cross in useless equilibrium

  And as the wind tunes through this vigilant bronze

  I hear again the sure confusing drum

  You followed from Boyne water to the Balkans

  But miss the twilit note your flute should sound.

  You were not keyed or pitched like these true-blue ones

  Though all of you consort now underground.

  FROM

  Sweeney Astray

  (1983)

  Sweeney Praises the Trees

  It was the end of the harvest season and Sweeney heard a hunting-call from a company in the skirts of the wood.

  —This will be the outcry of the Ui Faolain coming to kill me, he said. I slew their king at Moira and this host is out to avenge him.

  He heard the stag bellowing and he made a poem in which he praised aloud all the trees of Ireland, and rehearsed some of his own hardships and sorrows, saying:

  Suddenly this bleating

  and belling in the glen!

  The little timorous stag

  like a scared musician

  startles my heartstrings

  with high homesick refrains—

  deer on my lost mountains,

  flocks out on the plain.

  The bushy leafy oak tree

  is highest in the wood,

  the forking shoots of hazel

  hide sweet hazel-nuts.

  The alder is my darling,

  all thornless in the gap,

  some milk of human kindness

  coursing in its sap.

  The blackthorn is a jaggy creel

  stippled with dark sloes;

  green watercress in thatch on wells

  where the drinking blackbird goes.

  Sweetest of the leafy stalks,

  the vetches strew the pathway;

  the oyster-grass is my delight,

  and the wild strawberry.

  Low-set clumps of apple trees

  drum down fruit when shaken;

  scarlet berries clot like blood

  on mountain rowan.

  Briars curl in sideways,

  arch a stickle back,

  draw blood and curl up innocent

  to sneak the next attack.

  The yew tree in each churchyard

  wraps night in its dark hood.

  Ivy is a shadowy

  genius of the wood.

  Holly rears its windbreak,

  a door in winter’s face;

  life-blood on a spear-shaft

  darkens the grain of ash.

  Birch tree, smooth and blessed,

  delicious to the breeze,

  high twigs plait and crown it

  the queen of trees.

  The aspen pales

  and whispers, hesitate
s:

  a thousand frightened scuts

  race in its leaves.

  But what disturbs me most

  in the leafy wood

  is the to and fro and to and fro

  of an oak rod.

  Sweeney Astray

  I would live happy

  in an ivy bush

  high in some twisted tree

  and never come out.

  The skylarks rising

  to their high space

  send me pitching and tripping

  over stumps on the moor

  and my hurry flushes

  the turtle-dove.

  I overtake it,

  my plumage rushing,

  am startled

  by the startled woodcock

  or a blackbird’s sudden

  volubility.

  Think of my alarms,

  my coming to earth

  where the fox still

  gnaws at the bones,

  my wild career

  as the wolf from the wood

  goes tearing ahead

  and I lift towards the mountain,

  the bark of foxes

  echoing below me,

  the wolves behind me

  howling and rending—

  their vapoury tongues,

  their low-slung speed

  shaken off like nightmare

  at the foot of the slope.

  If I show my heels

  I am hobbled by guilt.

  I am a sheep

  without a fold

  who sleeps his sound sleep

  in the old tree at Kilnoo,

  dreaming back the good days

  with Congal in Antrim.

  A starry frost will come

  dropping on pools

  and I’ll be astray here

  on unsheltered heights:

  herons calling

  in cold Glenelly,

  flocks of birds quickly

  coming and going.

  I prefer the elusive

  rhapsody of blackbirds

  to the garrulous blather

  of men and women.

  I prefer the squeal of badgers

  in their sett

  to the tally-ho

  of the morning hunt.

  I prefer the re-

  echoing belling of a stag

  among the peaks

  to that arrogant horn.

  Those unharnessed runners

  from glen to glen!

  Nobody tames

  that royal blood,

  each one aloof

  on its rightful summit,

  antlered, watchful.

  Imagine them,

  the stag of high Slieve Felim,

  the stag of the steep Fews,

  the stag of Duhallow, the stag of Orrery,

  the fierce stag of Killarney.

  The stag of Islandmagee, Larne’s stag,

  the stag of Moylinny,

  the stag of Cooley, the stag of Cunghill,

  the stag of the two-peaked Burren.

  The mother of this herd

  is old and grey,

  the stags that follow her

  are branchy, many-tined.

  I would be cloaked in the grey

  sanctuary of her head,

  I would roost among

  her mazy antlers

  and would be lofted into

  this thicket of horns

  on the stag that lows at me

  over the glen.

  I am Sweeney, the whinger,

  the scuttler in the valley.

  But call me, instead,

  Peak-pate, Stag-head.

  Sweeney’s Lament on Ailsa Craig

  Without bed or board

  I face dark days

  in frozen lairs

  and wind-driven snow.

  Ice scoured by winds.

  Watery shadows from weak sun.

  Shelter from the one tree

  on a plateau.

  Haunting deer-paths,

  enduring rain,

  first-footing the grey

  frosted grass.

  I climb towards the pass

  and the stag’s belling

  rings off the wood,

  surf-noise rises

  where I go, heartbroken

  and worn out,

  sharp-haunched Sweeney,

  raving and moaning.

  The sough of the winter night,

  my feet packing the hailstones

  as I pad the dappled

  banks of Mourne

  or lie, unslept, in a wet bed

  on the hills by Lough Erne,

  tensed for first light

  and an early start.

  Skimming the waves

  at Dunseverick,

  listening to billows

  at Dun Rodairce,

  hurtling from that great wave

  to the wave running

  in tidal Barrow,

  one night in hard Dun Cernan,

  the next among the wild flowers

  of Benn Boirne;

  and then a stone pillow

  on the screes of Croagh Patrick.

  But to have ended up

  lamenting here

  on Ailsa Craig.

  A hard station!

  Ailsa Craig,

  the seagulls’ home,

  God knows it is

  hard lodgings.

  Ailsa Craig,

  bell-shaped rock,

  reaching sky-high,

  snout in the sea—

  it hard-beaked,

  me seasoned and scraggy:

  we mated like a couple

  of hard-shanked cranes.

  Sweeney in Connacht

  One day Sweeney went to Drum Iarann in Connacht, where he stole some watercress and drank from a green-flecked well. A cleric came out of the church, full of indignation and resentment, calling Sweeney a well-fed, contented madman, and reproaching him where he cowered in the yew tree:

  Cleric:

  Aren’t you the contented one?

  You eat my watercress,

  then you perch in the yew tree

  beside my little house.

  Sweeney:

  Contented’s not the word!

  I am so terrified,

  so panicky, so haunted

  I dare not bat an eyelid.

  The flight of a small wren

  scares me as much, bell-man,

  as a great expedition

  out to hunt me down.

  Were you in my place, monk,

  and I in yours, think:

  would you enjoy being mad?

  Would you be contented?

  Once when Sweeney was rambling and raking through Connacht he ended up in Alternan in Tireragh. A community of holy people had made their home there, and it was a lovely valley, with a turbulent river shooting down the cliff; trees fruited and blossomed on the cliff-face; there were sheltering ivies and heavy-topped orchards, there were wild deer and hares and fat swine; and sleek seals, that used to sleep on the cliff, having come in from the ocean beyond. Sweeney coveted the place mightily and sang its praises aloud in this poem:

  Sainted cliff at Alternan,

  nut grove, hazel-wood!

  Cold quick sweeps of water

  fall down the cliff-side.

  Ivies green and thicken there,

  its oak-mast is precious.

  Fruited branches nod and bend

  from heavy-headed apple trees.

  Badgers make their setts there

  and swift hares have their form;

  and seals’ heads swim the ocean,

  cobbling the running foam.

  And by the waterfall, Colman’s son,

  haggard, spent, frost-bitten Sweeney,

  Ronan of Drumgesh’s victim,

  is sleeping at the foot of a tree.

  Sweeney’s Last Poem

  There was a time when I preferred

  the turtle-dove’s soft jubilationr />
  as it flitted round a pool

  to the murmur of conversation.

  There was a time when I preferred

  the blackbird singing on the hill

  and the stag loud against the storm

  to the clinking tongue of this bell.

  There was a time when I preferred

  the mountain grouse crying at dawn

  to the voice and closeness

  of a beautiful woman.

  There was a time when I preferred

  wolf-packs yelping and howling

  to the sheepish voice of a cleric

  bleating out plainsong.

  You are welcome to pledge healths

  and carouse in your drinking dens;

  I will dip and steal water

  from a well with my open palm.

  You are welcome to that cloistered hush

  of your students’ conversation;

  I will study the pure chant

  of hounds baying in Glen Bolcain.

  You are welcome to your salt meat

  and fresh meat in feasting-houses;

  I will live content elsewhere

  on tufts of green watercress.

  The herd’s sharp spear wounded me

  and passed clean through my body.

  Ah Christ, who disposed all things, why

  was I not killed at Moira?

  Of all the innocent lairs I made

  the length and breadth of Ireland

  I remember an open bed

  above the lough in Mourne.

  Of all the innocent lairs I made

  the length and breadth of Ireland

  I remember bedding down

  above the wood in Glen Bolcain.

  To you, Christ, I give thanks

  for your Body in communion.

  Whatever evil I have done

  in this world, I repent.

  Then Sweeney’s death-swoon came over him and Moling, attended by his clerics, rose up and each of them placed a stone on Sweeney’s grave.

  FROM

  Station Island

  (1984)

  The Underground

  There we were in the vaulted tunnel running,

  You in your going-away coat speeding ahead

  And me, me then like a fleet god gaining

  Upon you before you turned to a reed

  Or some new white flower japped with crimson

  As the coat flapped wild and button after button

  Sprang off and fell in a trail

  Between the Underground and the Albert Hall.

  Honeymooning, mooning around, late for the Proms,

  Our echoes die in that corridor and now

  I come as Hansel came on the moonlit stones

  Retracing the path back, lifting the buttons

  To end up in a draughty lamplit station

  After the trains have gone, the wet track