100 Poems

by Seamus Heaney

  Faithful to the admonishment on her cup,

  Remember the Giver, fading off the lip.

  The Strand at Lough Beg

  in memory of Colum McCartney

  All round this little island, on the strand

  Far down below there, where the breakers strive,

  Grow the tall rushes from the oozy sand.

  DANTE, Purgatorio, I, 100–103

  Leaving the white glow of filling stations

  And a few lonely streetlamps among fields

  You climbed the hills towards Newtownhamilton

  Past the Fews Forest, out beneath the stars –

  Along that road, a high, bare pilgrim’s track

  Where Sweeney fled before the bloodied heads,

  Goat-beards and dogs’ eyes in a demon pack

  Blazing out of the ground, snapping and squealing.

  What blazed ahead of you? A faked roadblock?

  The red lamp swung, the sudden brakes and stalling

  Engine, voices, heads hooded and the cold-nosed gun?

  Or in your driving mirror, tailing headlights

  That pulled out suddenly and flagged you down

  Where you weren’t known and far from what you knew:

  The lowland clays and waters of Lough Beg,

  Church Island’s spire, its soft treeline of yew.

  There you once heard guns fired behind the house

  Long before rising time, when duck shooters

  Haunted the marigolds and bulrushes,

  But still were scared to find spent cartridges,

  Acrid, brassy, genital, ejected,

  On your way across the strand to fetch the cows.

  For you and yours and yours and mine fought shy,

  Spoke an old language of conspirators

  And could not crack the whip or seize the day:

  Big-voiced scullions, herders, feelers round

  Haycocks and hindquarters, talkers in byres,

  Slow arbitrators of the burial ground.

  Across that strand of yours the cattle graze

  Up to their bellies in an early mist

  And now they turn their unbewildered gaze

  To where we work our way through squeaking sedge

  Drowning in dew. Like a dull blade with its edge

  Honed bright, Lough Beg half-shines under the haze.

  I turn because the sweeping of your feet

  Has stopped behind me, to find you on your knees

  With blood and roadside muck in your hair and eyes,

  Then kneel in front of you in brimming grass

  And gather up cold handfuls of the dew

  To wash you, cousin. I dab you clean with moss

  Fine as the drizzle out of a low cloud.

  I lift you under the arms and lay you flat.

  With rushes that shoot green again, I plait

  Green scapulars to wear over your shroud.

  Casualty

  I

  He would drink by himself

  And raise a weathered thumb

  Towards the high shelf,

  Calling another rum

  And blackcurrant, without

  Having to raise his voice,

  Or order a quick stout

  By a lifting of the eyes

  And a discreet dumb-show

  Of pulling off the top;

  At closing time would go

  In waders and peaked cap

  Into the showery dark,

  A dole-kept breadwinner

  But a natural for work.

  I loved his whole manner,

  Sure-footed but too sly,

  His deadpan sidling tact,

  His fisherman’s quick eye

  And turned, observant back.

  Incomprehensible

  To him, my other life.

  Sometimes, on his high stool,

  Too busy with his knife

  At a tobacco plug

  And not meeting my eye,

  In the pause after a slug

  He mentioned poetry.

  We would be on our own

  And, always politic

  And shy of condescension,

  I would manage by some trick

  To switch the talk to eels

  Or lore of the horse and cart

  Or the Provisionals.

  But my tentative art

  His turned back watches too:

  He was blown to bits

  Out drinking in a curfew

  Others obeyed, three nights

  After they shot dead

  The thirteen men in Derry.

  PARAS THIRTEEN, the walls said,

  BOGSIDE NIL. That Wednesday

  Everybody held

  Their breath and trembled.

  II

  It was a day of cold

  Raw silence, windblown

  Surplice and soutane:

  Rained-on, flower-laden

  Coffin after coffin

  Seemed to float from the door

  Of the packed cathedral

  Like blossoms on slow water.

  The common funeral

  Unrolled its swaddling band,

  Lapping, tightening

  Till we were braced and bound

  Like brothers in a ring.

  But he would not be held

  At home by his own crowd

  Whatever threats were phoned,

  Whatever black flags waved.

  I see him as he turned

  In that bombed offending place,

  Remorse fused with terror

  In his still knowable face,

  His cornered outfaced stare

  Blinding in the flash.

  He had gone miles away

  For he drank like a fish

  Nightly, naturally

  Swimming towards the lure

  Of warm lit-up places,

  The blurred mesh and murmur

  Drifting among glasses

  In the gregarious smoke.

  How culpable was he

  That last night when he broke

  Our tribe’s complicity?

  ‘Now you’re supposed to be

  An educated man,’

  I hear him say. ‘Puzzle me

  The right answer to that one.’

  III

  I missed his funeral,

  Those quiet walkers

  And sideways talkers

  Shoaling out of his lane

  To the respectable

  Purring of the hearse …

  They move in equal pace

  With the habitual

  Slow consolation

  Of a dawdling engine,

  The line lifted, hand

  Over fist, cold sunshine

  On the water, the land

  Banked under fog: that morning

  When he took me in his boat,

  The screw purling, turning

  Indolent fathoms white,

  I tasted freedom with him.

  To get out early, haul

  Steadily off the bottom,

  Dispraise the catch, and smile

  As you find a rhythm

  Working you, slow mile by mile,

  Into your proper haunt

  Somewhere, well out, beyond …

  Dawn-sniffing revenant,

  Plodder through midnight rain,

  Question me again.

  The Singer’s House

  When they said Carrickfergus I could hear

  the frosty echo of saltminers’ picks.

  I imagined it, chambered and glinting,

  a township built of light.

  What do we say any more

  to conjure the salt of our earth?

  So much comes and is gone

  that should be crystal and kept,

  and amicable weathers

  that bring up the grain of things,

  their tang of season and store,

  are all the packing we’ll get.

  So I say to myself Gweebarra


  and its music hits off the place

  like water hitting off granite.

  I see the glittering sound

  framed in your window,

  knives and forks set on oilcloth,

  and the seals’ heads, suddenly outlined,

  scanning everything.

  People here used to believe

  that drowned souls lived in the seals.

  At spring tides they might change shape.

  They loved music and swam in for a singer

  who might stand at the end of summer

  in the mouth of a whitewashed turf-shed,

  his shoulder to the jamb, his song

  a rowboat far out in evening.

  When I came here first you were always singing,

  a hint of the clip of the pick

  in your winnowing climb and attack.

  Raise it again, man. We still believe what we hear.

  Elegy

  The way we are living,

  timorous or bold,

  will have been our life.

  Robert Lowell,

  the sill geranium is lit

  by the lamp I write by,

  a wind from the Irish Sea

  is shaking it –

  here where we all sat

  ten days ago, with you,

  the master elegist

  and welder of English.

  As you swayed the talk

  and rode on the swaying tiller

  of yourself, ribbing me

  about my fear of water,

  what was not within your empery?

  You drank America

  like the heart’s

  iron vodka,

  promulgating art’s

  deliberate, peremptory

  love and arrogance.

  Your eyes saw what your hand did

  as you Englished Russian,

  as you bullied out

  heart-hammering blank sonnets

  of love for Harriet

  and Lizzie, and the briny

  water-breaking dolphin –

  your dorsal nib

  gifted at last

  to inveigle and to plash,

  helmsman, netsman, retiarius.

  That hand. Warding and grooming

  and amphibious.

  Two a.m., seaboard weather.

  Not the proud sail of your great verse …

  No. You were our night ferry

  thudding in a big sea,

  the whole craft ringing

  with an armourer’s music

  the course set wilfully across

  the ungovernable and dangerous.

  And now a teem of rain

  and the geranium tremens.

  A father’s no shield

  for his child –

  you found the child in me

  when you took farewells

  under the full bay tree

  by the gate in Glanmore,

  opulent and restorative

  as that lingering summertime,

  the fish-dart of your eyes

  risking, ‘I’ll pray for you.’

  from Glanmore Sonnets

  for Ann Saddlemyer

  ‘our heartiest welcomer’

  II

  Sensings, mountings from the hiding places,

  Words entering almost the sense of touch,

  Ferreting themselves out of their dark hutch –

  ‘These things are not secrets but mysteries,’

  Oisin Kelly told me years ago

  In Belfast, hankering after stone

  That connived with the chisel, as if the grain

  Remembered what the mallet tapped to know.

  Then I landed in the hedge-school of Glanmore

  And from the backs of ditches hoped to raise

  A voice caught back off slug-horn and slow chanter

  That might continue, hold, dispel, appease:

  Vowels ploughed into other, opened ground,

  Each verse returning like the plough turned round.

  VII

  Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Irish Sea:

  Green, swift upsurges, North Atlantic flux

  Conjured by that strong gale-warning voice,

  Collapse into a sibilant penumbra.

  Midnight and closedown. Sirens of the tundra,

  Of eel-road, seal-road, keel-road, whale-road, raise

  Their wind-compounded keen behind the baize

  And drive the trawlers to the lee of Wicklow.

  L’Etoile, Le Guillemot, La Belle Hélène

  Nursed their bright names this morning in the bay

  That toiled like mortar. It was marvellous

  And actual, I said out loud, ‘A haven,’

  The word deepening, clearing, like the sky

  Elsewhere on Minches, Cromarty, The Faroes.

  The Otter

  When you plunged

  The light of Tuscany wavered

  And swung through the pool

  From top to bottom.

  I loved your wet head and smashing crawl,

  Your fine swimmer’s back and shoulders

  Surfacing and surfacing again

  This year and every year since.

  I sat dry-throated on the warm stones.

  You were beyond me.

  The mellowed clarities, the grape-deep air

  Thinned and disappointed.

  Thank God for the slow loadening,

  When I hold you now

  We are close and deep

  As the atmosphere on water.

  My two hands are plumbed water.

  You are my palpable, lithe

  Otter of memory

  In the pool of the moment,

  Turning to swim on your back,

  Each silent, thigh-shaking kick

  Retilting the light,

  Heaving the cool at your neck.

  And suddenly you’re out,

  Back again, intent as ever,

  Heavy and frisky in your freshened pelt,

  Printing the stones.

  The Skunk

  Up, black, striped and damasked like the chasuble

  At a funeral Mass, the skunk’s tail

  Paraded the skunk. Night after night

  I expected her like a visitor.

  The refrigerator whinnied into silence.

  My desk light softened beyond the verandah.

  Small oranges loomed in the orange tree.

  I began to be tense as a voyeur.

  After eleven years I was composing

  Love-letters again, broaching the word ‘wife’

  Like a stored cask, as if its slender vowel

  Had mutated into the night earth and air

  Of California. The beautiful, useless

  Tang of eucalyptus spelt your absence.

  The aftermath of a mouthful of wine

  Was like inhaling you off a cold pillow.

  And there she was, the intent and glamorous,

  Ordinary, mysterious skunk,

  Mythologized, demythologized,

  Snuffing the boards five feet beyond me.

  It all came back to me last night, stirred

  By the sootfall of your things at bedtime,

  Your head-down, tail-up hunt in a bottom drawer

  For the black plunge-line nightdress.

  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 ashplants 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