100 Poems

by Seamus Heaney

  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.

  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

  Bared and tensed as I am, all attention

  For your step following and damned if I look back.

  A Hazel Stick for Catherine Ann

  The living mother-of-pearl of a salmon

  just out of the water

  is gone just like that, but your stick

  is kept salmon-silver.

  Seasoned and bendy,

  it convinces the hand

  that what you have you hold

  to play with and pose with

  and lay about with.

  But then too it points back to cattle

  and spatter and beating

  the bars of a gate –

  the very stick we might cut

  from your family tree.

  The living cobalt of an afternoon

  dragonfly drew my eye to it first

  and the evening I trimmed it for you

  you saw your first glow-worm –

  all of us stood round in silence, even you

  gigantic enough to darken the sky

  for a glow-worm.

  And when I poked open the grass

  a tiny brightening den lit the eye

  in the blunt pared end of your stick.

  A Kite for Michael and Christopher

  All through that Sunday afternoon

  a kite flew above Sunday,

  a tightened drumhead, a flitter of blown chaff.

  I’d seen it grey and slippy in the making,

  I’d tapped it when it dried out white and stiff,

  I’d tied the bows of newspaper

  along its six-foot tail.

  But now it was far up like a small black lark

  and now it dragged as if the bellied string

  were a wet rope hauled upon

  to lift a shoal.

  My friend says that the human soul

  is about the weight of a snipe,

  yet the soul at anchor there,

  the string that sags and ascends,

  weighs like a furrow assumed into the heavens.

  Before the kite plunges down into the wood

  and this line goes useless

  take in your two hands, boys, and feel

  the strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief.

  You were born fit for it.

  Stand in here in front of me

  and take the strain.

  The Railway Children

  When we climbed the slopes of the cutting

  We were eye-level with the white cups

  Of the telegraph poles and the sizzling wires.

  Like lovely freehand they curved for miles

  East and miles west beyond us, sagging

  Under their burden of swallows.

  We were small and thought we knew nothing

  Worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires

  In the shiny pouches of raindrops,

  Each one seeded full with the light

  Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves

  So infinitesimally scaled

  We could stream through the eye of a needle.

  from Station Island

  VII

  I had come to the edge of the water,

  soothed by just looking, idling over it

  as if it were a clear barometer

  or a mirror, when his reflection

  did not appear but I sensed a presence

  entering into my concentration

  on not being concentrated as he spoke

  my name. And though I was reluctant

  I turned to meet his face and the shock

  is still in me at what I saw. His brow

  was blown open above the eye and blood

  had dried on his neck and cheek. ‘Easy now,’

  he said, ‘it’s only me. You’ve seen men as raw

  after a football match … What time it was

  when I was wakened up I still don’t know

  but I heard this knocking, knocking, and it

  scared me, like the phone in the small hours,

  so I had the sense not to put on the light

  but looked out from behind the curtain.

  I saw two customers on the doorstep

  and an old Land Rover with the doors open

  parked on the street, so I let the curtain drop;

  but they must have been waiting for it to move

  for they shouted to come down into the shop.

  She started to cry then and roll round the bed,

  lamenting and lamenting to herself,

  not even asking who it was. “Is your head

  astray, or what’s come over you?” I roared, more

  to bring myself to my senses

  than out of any real anger at her

  for the knocking shook me, the way they kept it up,

  and her whingeing and half-screeching made it worse.

  All the time they were shouting, “Shop!

  Shop!
” so I pulled on my shoes and a sportscoat

  and went back to the window and called out,

  “What do you want? Could you quieten the racket

  or I’ll not come down at all.” “There’s a child not well.

  Open up and see what you have got – pills

  or a powder or something in a bottle,”

  one of them said. He stepped back off the footpath

  so I could see his face in the streetlamp

  and when the other moved I knew them both.

  But bad and all as the knocking was, the quiet

  hit me worse. She was quiet herself now,

  lying dead still, whispering to watch out.

  At the bedroom door I switched on the light.

  “It’s odd they didn’t look for a chemist.

  Who are they anyway at this hour of the night?”

  she asked me, with the eyes standing in her head.

  “I know them to see,” I said, but something

  made me reach and squeeze her hand across the bed

  before I went downstairs into the aisle

  of the shop. I stood there, going weak

  in the legs. I remember the stale smell

  of cooked meat or something coming through

  as I went to open up. From then on

  you know as much about it as I do.’

  ‘Did they say nothing?’ ‘Nothing. What would they say?’

  ‘Were they in uniform? Not masked in any way?’

  ‘They were barefaced as they would be in the day,

  shites thinking they were the be-all and the end-all.’

  ‘Not that it is any consolation

  but they were caught,’ I told him, ‘and got jail.’

  Big-limbed, decent, open-faced, he stood

  forgetful of everything now except

  whatever was welling up in his spoiled head,

  beginning to smile. ‘You’ve put on a bit of weight

  since you did your courting in that big Austin

  you got the loan of on a Sunday night.’

  Through life and death he had hardly aged.

  There always was an athlete’s cleanliness

  shining off him, and except for the ravaged

  forehead and the blood, he was still that same

  rangy midfielder in a blue jersey

  and starched pants, the one stylist on the team,

  the perfect, clean, unthinkable victim.

  ‘Forgive the way I have lived indifferent –

  forgive my timid circumspect involvement,’

  I surprised myself by saying. ‘Forgive

  my eye,’ he said, ‘all that’s above my head.’

  And then a stun of pain seemed to go through him

  and he trembled like a heatwave and faded.

  XII

  Like a convalescent, I took the hand

  stretched down from the jetty, sensed again

  an alien comfort as I stepped on ground

  to find the helping hand still gripping mine,

  fish-cold and bony, but whether to guide

  or to be guided I could not be certain

  for the tall man in step at my side

  seemed blind, though he walked straight as a rush

  upon his ashplant, his eyes fixed straight ahead.

  Then I knew him in the flesh

  out there on the tarmac among the cars,

  wintered hard and sharp as a blackthorn bush.

  His voice eddying with the vowels of all rivers

  came back to me, though he did not speak yet,

  a voice like a prosecutor’s or a singer’s,

  cunning, narcotic, mimic, definite

  as a steel nib’s downstroke, quick and clean,

  and suddenly he hit a litter basket

  with his stick, saying, ‘Your obligation

  is not discharged by any common rite.

  What you do you must do on your own.

  The main thing is to write

  for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust

  that imagines its haven like your hands at night

  dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.

  You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.

  Take off from here. And don’t be so earnest,

  so ready for the sackcloth and the ashes.

  Let go, let fly, forget.

  You’ve listened long enough. Now strike your note.’

  It was as if I had stepped free into space

  alone with nothing that I had not known

  already. Raindrops blew in my face

  as I came to and heard the harangue and jeers

  going on and on. ‘The English language

  belongs to us. You are raking at dead fires,

  rehearsing the old whinges at your age.

  That subject people stuff is a cod’s game,

  infantile, like this peasant pilgrimage.

  You lose more of yourself than you redeem

  doing the decent thing. Keep at a tangent.

  When they make the circle wide, it’s time to swim

  out on your own and fill the element

  with signatures on your own frequency,

  echo-soundings, searches, probes, allurements,

  elver-gleams in the dark of the whole sea.’

  The shower broke in a cloudburst, the tarmac

  fumed and sizzled. As he moved off quickly

  the downpour loosed its screens round his straight walk.

  Alphabets

  I

  A shadow his father makes with joined hands

  And thumbs and fingers nibbles on the wall

  Like a rabbit’s head. He understands

  He will understand more when he goes to school.

  There he draws smoke with chalk the whole first week,

  Then draws the forked stick that they call a Y.

  This is writing. A swan’s neck and swan’s back

  Make the 2 he can see now as well as say.

  Two rafters and a cross-tie on the slate

  Are the letter some call ah, some call ay.

  There are charts, there are headlines, there is a right

  Way to hold the pen and a wrong way.

  First it is ‘copying out’, and then ‘English’,

  Marked correct with a little leaning hoe.

  Smells of inkwells rise in the classroom hush.

  A globe in the window tilts like a coloured O.

  II

  Declensions sang on air like a hosanna

  As, column after stratified column,

  Book One of Elementa Latina,

  Marbled and minatory, rose up in him.

  For he was fostered next in a stricter school

  Named for the patron saint of the oak wood

  Where classes switched to the pealing of a bell

  And he left the Latin forum for the shade

  Of new calligraphy that felt like home.

  The letters of this alphabet were trees.

  The capitals were orchards in full bloom,

  The lines of script like briars coiled in ditches.

  Here in her snooded garment and bare feet,

  All ringleted in assonance and woodnotes,

  The poet’s dream stole over him like sunlight

  And passed into the tenebrous thickets.

  He learns this other writing. He is the scribe

  Who drove a team of quills on his white field.

  Round his cell door the blackbirds dart and dab.

  Then self-denial, fasting, the pure cold.

  By rules that hardened the farther they reached north

  He bends to his desk and begins again.

  Christ’s sickle has been in the undergrowth.

  The script grows bare and Merovingian.

  III

  The globe has spun. He stands in a wooden O.

  He alludes to Shakespeare. He alludes to Graves.

  Time has bulldozed the school and s
chool window.

  Balers drop bales like printouts where stooked sheaves

  Made lambdas on the stubble once at harvest

  And the delta face of each potato pit

  Was patted straight and moulded against frost.

  All gone, with the omega that kept

  Watch above each door, the good-luck horseshoe.

  Yet shape-note language, absolute on air

  As Constantine’s sky-lettered IN HOC SIGNO

  Can still command him; or the necromancer

  Who would hang from the domed ceiling of his house

  A figure of the world with colours in it

  So that the figure of the universe

  And ‘not just single things’ would meet his sight

  When he walked abroad. As from his small window

  The astronaut sees all he has sprung from,

  The risen, aqueous, singular, lucent O

  Like a magnified and buoyant ovum –

  Or like my own wide pre-reflective stare

  All agog at the plasterer on his ladder

  Skimming our gable and writing our name there

  With his trowel point, letter by strange letter.