Constable Calls, A
Death of a Naturalist
Digging
Disappearing Island, The
Dream of Jealousy, A
Drifting Off
Drink of Water, A
England’s Difficulty
Exposure
Field Work
First Flight, The
First Kingdom, The
Follower
Fosterage
From the Canton of Expectation
From the Frontier of Writing
From the Republic of Conscience
Funeral Rites
Gifts of Rain
Glanmore Sonnets
Granite Chip
Grauballe Man, The
Guttural Muse, The
Hailstones
Harvest Bow, The
Haw Lantern, The
Hazel Stick for Catherine Ann, A
Hercules and Antaeus
Holly
Incertus
In Illo Tempore
In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge
In the Beech
King of the Ditchbacks, The
Kite for Michael and Christopher, A
Limbo
Making Strange
Master, The
Mid-Term Break
Milk Factory, The
Ministry of Fear, The
Mossbawn
Mud Vision, The
Nesting-Ground
New Song, A
Night Drive
North
Old Smoothing Iron
On the Road
Oracle
Other Side, The
Otter, The
Oysters
Peninsula, The
Personal Helicon
Poem
Punishment
Railway Children, The
Relic of Memory
Requiem for the Croppies
Sandstone Keepsake
Scribes, The
Seed Cutters, The
Shelf Life
Sibyl (Triptych, II)
Singer’s House, The
Singing School
Skunk, The
Sloe Gin
Song
Spoonbait, The
Station Island
Stations of the West, The
Stone from Delphi
Stone Verdict, The
Strand at Lough Beg, The
Strange Fruit
Summer Home
Summer 1969
Sunlight
Sweeney Astray
Sweeney in Connacht
Sweeney Praises the Trees
Sweeney Redivivus
Sweeney’s Lament on Ailsa Craig
Sweeney’s Last Poem
Terminus
Thatcher
Tollund Man, The
Toome Road, The
Trial Runs
Triptych
Underground, The
Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces
Visitant
Wedding Day
Westering
Whatever You Say Say Nothing
Wife’s Tale, The
Wishing Tree, The
Wolfe Tone
Index of First Lines
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A carter’s trophy
A cobble thrown a hundred years ago
A hurry of bell-notes
All through that Sunday afternoon
All year the flax-dam festered in the heart
An old man’s hands, like soft paws rowing forward
A rowan like a lipsticked girl
As a child, they could not keep me from wells
A shadow his father makes with joined hands
As if a trespasser
As if he had been poured
As if the prisms of the kaleidoscope
As you plaited the harvest bow
Bespoke for weeks, he turned up some morning
Between my finger and my thumb
Black water. White waves. Furrows snowcapped
Blurred swimmings as I faced the sun, my back
Cloudburst and steady downpour now
‘Description is revelation!’ Royal
Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Irish Sea
Fear of affectation made her affect
Fishermen at Ballyshannon
Freckle-face, fox-head, pod of the broom
He dwelt in himself
He lived there in the unsayable lights
Here is the girl’s head like an exhumed gourd
He would drink by himself
Hide in the hollow trunk
His bicycle stood at the window-sill
Houndstooth stone. Aberdeen of the mind
I am afraid
I can feel the tug
I dreamt we slept in a moss in Donegal
I had come to the edge of the water
I heard new words prayed at cows
I knelt. Hiatus. Habit’s afterlife …
I love the thought of his anger
I met a girl from Derrygarve
I moved like a double agent …
I’m writing this just after an encounter
I never warmed to them
In the first flush of the Easter holidays
In the last minutes he said more to her
I returned to a long strand
I sat all morning in the college sick bay
I shouldered a kind of manhood
I sit under Rand McNally’s
I stood between them
It could be a jaw-bone
I thought of her as the wishing tree that died
I thought of walking round and round a space
It is a kind of chalky russet
It is December in Wicklow
It kept treading air …
It rained when it should have snowed
It was more sleepwalk than spasm
It was the end of the harvest season …
I used to lie with an ear to the line
I was a lookout posted and forgotten
I was parked on a high road, listening
I went disguised in it …
I would live happy
Late August, given heavy rain and sun
Late summer, and at midnight
Leaving the white glow of filling stations
Light as a skiff, manoeuvrable
Light was calloused …
Like a convalescent, I took the hand
Love, I shall perfect for you the child
Morning stir in the hostel. A pot
‘My brain dried like spread turf, my stomach
My cheek was hit and hit
My father worked with a horse-plough
My ‘place of clear water’
My tongue moved, a swung relaxing hinge
Often I watched her lift it
Once we presumed to found ourselves for good
On Devenish I heard a snipe
One day Sweeney went to Drum Iarann …
One morning early I met armoured cars
On my first night in the Gaeltacht …
Our shells clacked on the plates
Outside the kitchen window a black rat
Polished linoleum shone there. Brass taps shone
Riverbank, the long rigs
Scuts of froth swirled from the discharge pipe
Sensings, mountings from the hiding places
She came every morning to draw water
She taught me what her uncle once taught her
She would plunge all poets in the ninth circle
Sky-born and royal
So a new similitude is given us
Soft corrugations in the boortree’s trunk
So, he would pay his ‘debt to medicine’
Some day I will go to Aarhus
Statues with exposed hearts and barbed-wire crowns
The big missal splayed
The bronze soldier hitches a bronze cape
The clear weather of juniper
The cool that came off sheets just off the line
The guttersnipe and the albatross
The living mother-of-pearl of a salmon
The lough waters
The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley
There was a sunlit absence
There was a time when I preferred
There we were in the vaulted tunnel running
The road ahead
The royal roads were cow paths
The sandmartins’ nests were loopholes …
The smells of ordinariness
The tightness and the nilness round that space
The wintry haw is burning out of season
They seem hundreds of years away. Brueghel
Thigh-deep in sedge and marigolds
This evening the cuckoo and the corncrake
Thunderlight on the split logs: big raindrops
To be carried back to the shrine some dawn
To-night, a first movement, a pulse
Up, black, striped and damasked like the chasuble
Vowels ploughed into other: opened ground
Walking with you and another lady
Was it wind off the dumps
We have no prairies
WELCOME HOME YE LADS …
We lived deep in a land of optative moods
Well, as Kavanagh said, we have lived
When all the others were away at Mass
When he stands in the judgement place
When I had spread it all on linen cloth
When I hoked there, I would find
When I landed in the republic of conscience
When the badger glimmered away
When the lamp glowed
When they said Carrickfergus I could hear
When we climbed the slopes of the cutting
When you have nothing more to say, just drive
When you plunged
Where the sally tree went pale in every breeze
While the Constabulary covered the mob
White bone found
Without bed or board
BOOKS BY SEAMUS HEANEY
POETRY
Death of a Naturalist
Door into the Dark
Wintering Out
North
Field Work
Poems 1965–1975
Sweeney Astray: A Version from the Irish
Station Island
The Haw Lantern
Selected Poems 1966–1987
Seeing Things
CRITICISM
Preoccupations
The Government of the Tongue
PLAYS
The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes
Copyright © 1990 by Seamus Heaney
All rights reserved
Library of Congress catalog card number: 90-81169
First published in 1990 by Faber and Faber Limited
First American edition published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990
This edition first published in 1991 by The Noonday Press
eISBN 9781466855786
First eBook edition: January 2014