Between languages, half in thrall to desire,
Half shy of it, when a flit of the foreknown
Blinked off a sunlit lake near the horizon
And passed into us, climbing and clunking up
Those fretted metal steps, as we reboarded
And were reincarnated seat by seat.
III White Nights
Furrow-plodders in spats and bright clasped brogues
Are cradling bags and hoisting beribboned drones
As their skilled neck-pullers’ fingers force the chanters
And the whole band starts rehearsing
Its stupendous, swaggering march
Inside the hall. Meanwhile
One twilit field and summer hedge away
We wait for the learner who will stay behind
Piping by stops and starts,
Making an injured music for us alone,
Early-to-beds, white-night absentees
Open-eared to this day.
‘The door was open and the house was dark’
in memory of David Hammond
The door was open and the house was dark
Wherefore I called his name, although I knew
The answer this time would be silence
That kept me standing listening while it grew
Backwards and down and out into the street
Where as I’d entered (I remember now)
The streetlamps too were out.
I felt, for the first time there and then, a stranger,
Intruder almost, wanting to take flight
Yet well aware that here there was no danger,
Only withdrawal, a not unwelcoming
Emptiness, as in a midnight hangar
On an overgrown airfield in late summer.
In the Attic
I
Like Jim Hawkins aloft in the cross-trees
Of Hispaniola, nothing underneath him
But still green water and clean bottom sand,
The ship aground, the canted mast far out
Above a sea-floor where striped fish pass in shoals –
And when they’ve passed, the face of Israel Hands
That rose in the shrouds before Jim shot him dead
Appears to rise again … ‘But he was dead enough,’
The story says, ‘being both shot and drowned.’
II
A birch tree planted twenty years ago
Comes between the Irish Sea and me
At the attic skylight, a man marooned
In his own loft, a boy
Shipshaped in the crow’s nest of a life,
Airbrushed to and fro, wind-drunk, braced
By all that’s thrumming up from keel to masthead,
Rubbing his eyes to believe them and this most
Buoyant, billowy, topgallant birch.
III
Ghost-footing what was then the terra firma
Of hallway linoleum, grandfather now appears,
His voice a-waver like the draught-prone screen
They’d set up in the Club Rooms earlier
For the matinee I’ve just come back from.
‘And Isaac Hands,’ he asks, ‘Was Isaac in it?’
His memory of the name a-waver too,
His mistake perpetual, once and for all,
Like the single splash when Israel’s body fell.
IV
As I age and blank on names,
As my uncertainty on stairs
Is more and more the lightheadedness
Of a cabin boy’s first time on the rigging,
As the memorable bottoms out
Into the irretrievable,
It’s not that I can’t imagine still
That slight untoward rupture and world-tilt
As a wind freshened and the anchor weighed.
A Kite for Aibhín
after ‘L’Aquilone’ by Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912)
Air from another life and time and place,
Pale blue heavenly air is supporting
A white wing beating high against the breeze,
And yes, it is a kite! As when one afternoon
All of us there trooped out
Among the briar hedges and stripped thorn,
I take my stand again, halt opposite
Anahorish Hill to scan the blue,
Back in that field to launch our long-tailed comet.
And now it hovers, tugs, veers, dives askew,
Lifts itself, goes with the wind until
It rises to loud cheers from us below.
Rises, and my hand is like a spindle
Unspooling, the kite a thin-stemmed flower
Climbing and carrying, carrying farther, higher
The longing in the breast and planted feet
And gazing face and heart of the kite flier
Until string breaks and – separate, elate –
The kite takes off, itself alone, a windfall.
In Time
for Síofra
Energy, balance, outbreak:
Listening to Bach
I saw you years from now
(More years than I’ll be allowed)
Your toddler wobbles gone,
A sure and grown woman.
Your bare foot on the floor
Keeps me in step; the power
I first felt come up through
Our cement floor long ago
Palps your sole and heel
And earths you here for real.
An oratorio
Would be just the thing for you:
Energy, balance, outbreak
At play for their own sake
But for now we foot it lightly
In time, and silently.
18 August 2013
Index
Album, 176
Anahorish 1944, 147
Anything Can Happen, 148
At Banagher, 108
At the Wellhead, 106
Audenesque, 139
Augean Stables, The, 135
August Night, An, 10
Baler, The, 191
Ballynahinch Lake, 127
Beowulf (from), 112, 118
Bereaved, The, 143
Blackbird of Glanmore, The, 173
Boarders, 156
Bodies and Souls, 143
Butts, The, 184
Call, A, 99
Cassandra, 81
Castalian Spring, 136
Chanson d’Aventure, 186
Clothes Shrine, The, 128
Conkers, 133
Conway Stewart, The, 181
Cot, The, 16
Crossings, 42
Damson, 71
Desfina, 137
District and Circle, 149
Dog Was Crying Tonight in Wicklow Also, A, 101
Eelworks, 193
Electric Light (from), 145
Errand, The, 100
Fiddleheads, 171
Field of Vision, 11
Flight Path, The (from), 78
Fosterling, 25
Found Prose, 153
Glanmore Eclogue, 129
Glanmore Revisited (from), 15
Golden Bough, The, 1
Gravel Walks, The, 90
‘Had I not been awake’, 175
His Dawn Vision, 84
His Reverie of Water, 87
Höfn, 165
Human Chain, 190
In Iowa, 164
In the Afterlife, 143
In the Attic, 215
In Time, 218
Into Arcadia, 132
Keeping Going, 66
Kite for Aibhín, A, 217
Lagans Road, The, 153
Lift, The, 158
Lightenings, 26
‘Like everybody else …’, 163
Little Canticles of Asturias, The, 125
Lupins, 121
Lustral Sonnet, 17
Man and Boy, 5
Markings, 3
Mint, 62
Miracle, 189
Mycenae Lookout, 80
Nights, The, 85
Nights of ’57, 143
Nonce Words, 160
Out of the Bag (from), 122
Out of This World (from), 163
Parking Lot, 212
Perch, 120
Pillowed Head, A, 19
Pitchfork, The, 12
Planting the Alder, 169
‘Poet’s Chair’, 93
Postscript, 111
Pylos, 134
Quitting Time, 172
Rain Stick, The, 61
Riverbank Field, The, 197
Route 110, 199
Royal Prospect, A, 21
St Kevin and the Blackbird, 76
Scrabble, 15
Seeing Things, 7
Settings, 36
Settle Bed, The, 13
Shiver, A, 146
Sidhe, 211
Skylight, The, 18
Sofa in the Forties, A, 63
Sonnets from Hellas, 132
Squarings, 49
Squarings (from), 26
Stern, 162
Strand, The, 103
Swing, The, 95
Tall Dames, 155
Tate’s Avenue, 170
‘The door was open and the house was dark’, 214
Tollund, 110
Tollund Man in Springtime, The, 166
Two Lorries, 69
Two Stick Drawings, 97
Uncoupled, 182
Vitruviana, 138
Walk, The, 104
Watchman’s War, The, 80
Weighing In, 73
Wheels within Wheels, 23
Whitby-sur-Moyola, 92
White Nights, 213
Wordsworth’s Skates, 152
Wraiths, 211
About the Author
Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland. Death of a Naturalist, his first collection of poems, appeared in 1966, and was followed by poetry, criticism and translations which established him as the leading poet of his generation. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and twice won the Whitbread Book of the Year, for The Spirit Level (1996) and Beowulf (1999). Stepping Stones, a book of interviews conducted by Dennis O’Driscoll, appeared in 2008; Human Chain, his last volume of poems, was awarded the 2010 Forward Prize for Best Collection. He died in 2013.
By the Same Author
poetry
DEATH OF A NATURALIST
DOOR INTO THE DARK
WINTERING OUT
NORTH
FIELD WORK
STATION ISLAND
SWEENEY ASTRAY
SWEENEY’S FLIGHT
(with photographs by Rachel Giese)
THE HAW LANTERN
NEW SELECTED POEMS 1966–1987
SEEING THINGS
LAMENTS BY JAN KOCHANOWSKI
(translated with Stanisław Barańczak)
THE SPIRIT LEVEL
OPENED GROUND: POEMS 1966–1996
BEOWULF
ELECTRIC LIGHT
DISTRICT AND CIRCLE
THE TESTAMENT OF CRESSEID & SEVEN FABLES
HUMAN CHAIN
NEW SELECTED POEMS 1988–2013
THE RATTLE BAG
(edited with Ted Hughes)
THE SCHOOL BAG
(edited with Ted Hughes)
prose
PREOCCUPATIONS: SELECTED PROSE 1968–78
THE GOVERNMENT OF THE TONGUE
THE REDRESS OF POETRY: OXFORD LECTURES
FINDERS KEEPERS: SELECTED PROSE 1971–2001
STEPPING STONES
(with Dennis O’Driscoll)
plays
THE CURE AT TROY
THE BURIAL AT THEBES
Copyright
First published in 2014
by Faber & Faber Ltd
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This ebook edition first published in 2014
All rights reserved
© The Estate of Seamus Heaney, 2014
Cover design by Faber
Cover photograph © Antonio Zazueta Olmos
The right of Seamus Heaney to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–32173–5