1. !
V
also by Seamus Heaney I
poetry
f SEAMUS HEANEY
1
' North
D E A T H OFA NATURALIST
D O O R INTO T H E DARK
'~**~~ W I N T E R I N G " O T J T ~
FIELD WORK
STATION ISLAND ' •
S W E E N E Y ASTRAY
T H E H A W L A N T E R N
NEW SELECTED POEMS lj66-T.J%J
SEEING THINGS
SWEENEY'S FLIGHT
[with photographs by Rachel Giese)
T H E R A T T L E BAG
[edited with Ted Hughes)
L A M E N T S by Jan Kochanowski
[translated with Stanislaw Baranczak)
prose
PREOCCUPATIONS:
Selected Prose 1968-78
T H E G O V E R N M E N T O FT H E T O N G U E
T H E R E D R E S S O F P O E T R Y
plays
T H E C U R E AT TO nv
•fern
L O N D O N • BOSTON
84800
I 91^
3. Mossbawn: Two Poems
in Dedication
for Mary Heaney
I. S.UNLIGHT
There was a sunlit absence.
The helmeted pump in the yard
heated its iron,
water honeyed
in the slung bucket
and the sun stood * '••
like a griddle cooling-•"
against the wall
of each long afternoon.
So, her hands scuffled <f$-^
over the bakeboard,
the reddening stove
sent its plaque of heat
against her where she stood
in a flour/y apron
by the window.
N o w HEE) dusts the board • .
with a^gooseVwmg,
now sits, broad-lapped,
w i t h whitened nails
[ix]
4. and jrneasiing_sJiias :
here is a space
again, thejscrjrj^ rising
to the tick of two clocks. X . T H E SEED CUTTERS
And here is love They seem hundreds of years away.,Bx£u^hel,
like a tinsmith's scoop You'll know them if I can get them true.
sunk past its gleam They kneel under the hedge in a half-circle
in the meal-bin. Behind;a^w±T£l^^
• They are the seed cutters. The tuck and frill „
Of leaf-sprout is on the seed potatoes
Buried under that straw. W i t h time to kill
They are taking their time. Each sharp knife goes
Lazily halving each root that falls apart
In the palm of the hand: a milky gleam,
And, at the centre, a dark watermark.
O calendar customs! Under the broom
Yellowing over them, compose the friezt.
W i t h all of us there, our anonymities.
[xi ]
5. Poems by Seamus Heaney
"Antaeus" "Hercules and Antaeus"
when I lie on the ground Sky-born and royal,
I rise flushed as a rose in the morning. Snake-choker, dung-heaver,
In fights I arrange a fall on the ring His mind big with golden apples,
To rub myself with sand. His future hung with trophies,
That is operative Hercules has the measure
As an elixir. I cannot be weaned of resistance and black powers
Off the earth's long contour, her river-veins. feeding off hte terrotory.
Down her in my cave, Antaeus, the mould-hugger,
Girded with root and rock, Is weaned at last
I am cradled in the dark that wombed me A fall was a renewal
And nurtured i n every artery But he is raised up -
Like a small hillock. The challenger's intelligence
Let each new hero come Is a spur of light, a blue prong graiping him
Seeking the golden apples and Atlas. Out of his element
He must wrestle with me before he pass Into a dream of loss and origins ...
Into that realm of fame
Among sky-bom and royal:
He may well throw me and renew my birth
But let him not plan, lifting me off the earth,
M y elevation, my fall.
6. Who will say 'corpse'
The Gratiballe Man to his vivid cast?
Who will say 'body'
to his opaque repose?
As if he had been poured
in tar, he lies And his rusted hair,
on a pillow of turf a mat unlikely
and seems to weep as a foetus's.
I first saw his twisted face
the black river of. himself.
The grain of his wrists in a photograph,
is like bog oak, a head and shoulder
the ball of his heel. out of the peat,
bruised like a forceps baby,
like a basalt egg.
His instep has shrunk -but now he lies
cold as a swan's foot perfected in my memory,
or a wet swamp root. down to the red horn
of his nails,
His hips are the ridge
and purse of a mussel, hung in the scales
his spine an eel arrested with beauty and atrocity:
under a glisten of mud. with the Dying25u|)
too strictly compassed
The head lifts,
the chin is a visor on his shield,
raised above the vent w i t h the actual weight
of his slashed throat of each hooded victim,
slashed and dumped.
that has tanned and toughened.
The cured wound
opens inwards to a dark
elderberry place.
7. in
Ocean's Love to Ireland
Jjhejniin^^ complains in Irish,
Ocean has scattered her dreams of fleets,
The Spanish prince has spilled his gold
Speaking broad Devonshire,
And failed her. Iambic drums
Ralegh has backed the maid to a tree
Of English beat the woods where her poets
,As Ireland is backed to England
Sink like £)nan. Rush-light, mushroom-flesh,
And drives inland
She fades from their somnolent clasp
T i l l all her strands are breathless:
Into ringlet-breath and dew,
^^Sweesir, Swatter ijSyyeesir^ Swatter!'
The ground possessed and-xepossessed.
He is water, he is ocean, lifting
farthingale like a scarf of weed lifting
In the front of a wave.
n
Yet his superb crest inclines to Cynthia
Even while it runs its bent
In the rivers of Lee and Blackwater.
Those are the plashy spots where he would lay
His cape before her. In London, his name
Will rise on water, and on these dark seepings:
Smerwick sowed with the mouthing corpses .
Of six hundred papists, 'as gallant and good
Personages as ever were.beheld. .- . -
5 . -
[40]
