Less durable if more desired,
The mealy textured wallpaper:
Its brede of bosomed roses pressed
And flattened under smoothing irons.
Brown parcel paper, if need be.
Newsprint, even. Anything
To make a covert for the newness,
Learn you were a keeper only.
II
Open, settle, smell, begin.
A spelling out, a finger trace:
One with Fursa, Colmcille,
The riddle-solving anchorites –
Macóige of Lismore, for instance,
Who, when asked which attribute
Of character was best, replied
‘Steadiness, for it is best
When a man has set his hand to tasks
To persevere. I have never heard
Fault found with that.’ Tongue-tried words
Finger-traced, retraced, lip-read.
III
Bread and pencils. Musty satchel.
The age of lessons to be learnt.
Reader, ours were ‘reading books’
And we were ‘scholars’, our good luck
To get such schooling in the first place
For all its second and third handings.
The herdsman by the roadside told you.
The sibyls of the chimney corner.
The age of wonders too, such as:
Rubbings out with balls of bread-pith,
Birds and butterflies in ‘transfers’
Like stamps from Eden on a flyleaf.
IV
The master’s store an otherwhere:
Penshafts sheathed in black tin – was it? –
A metal wrap, at any rate,
A tight nib-holding cuticle –
And nibs in packets by the gross,
Powdered ink, bunched cedar pencils,
Jotters, exercise books, rulers
Stacked like grave goods on the shelves.
The privilege of being sent
To fetch a box of pristine chalk
Or perfect copperplate examples
Of headline script for copying out.
V
‘There are three right ways to spell tu.
Can you tell me how you write that down?’
The herdsman asks. And when we can’t,
‘Ask the master if he can.’
Neque, Caesar says, fas esse
existimant ea litteris
mandare. ‘Nor do they think it right
To commit the things they know to writing.’
Not, that is, until there comes
The psalm book called in Irish cathach,
Meaning ‘battler’, meaning victory
When borne three times round an army.
VI
Sparks the Ulster warriors struck
Off wielded swords made Bricriu’s hall
Blaze like the sun, according to
The Dun Cow scribe; and then Cuchulain
Entertained the embroidery women
By flinging needles in the air
So as they fell the point of one
Partnered with the eye of the next
To form a glittering reeling chain –
As in my dream a gross of nibs
Into a giddy gilt corona.
VII
A vision of the school the school
Won’t understand, nor I, not quite:
My hand in the cold of a running stream
Suspended, a glass beaker dipped
And filling in the flow. I’m sent,
The privileged one, for water
To turn ink powder into ink –
Out in the open, the land and sky
And playground silent, a singing class
I’ve been excused from going on,
Coming out through opened windows,
Yet still and all a world away.
VIII
‘Inkwell’ now as robbed of sense
As ‘inkhorn’: a dun cow’s, perhaps,
Stuck upside down at dipping distance
In the floor of the cell. Hence Colmcille’s
Extempore when a loudmouth lands
Breaking the Iona silence:
This harbour shouter, it roughly goes,
Staff in hand, he will come along
Inclined to kiss the kiss of peace,
He will blunder in,
His toe will catch and overturn
My little inkhorn, spill my ink.
IX
A great one has put faith in ‘meaning’
That runs through space like a word
Screaming and protesting, another in
‘Poet’s imaginings
And memories of love’:
Mine for now I put
In steady-handedness maintained
In books against its vanishing.
Books of Lismore. Kells. Armagh.
Of Lecan, its great Yellow Book.
‘The battler’, berry-browned, enshrined.
The cured hides. The much tried pens.
‘Lick the Pencil’
I
‘Lick the pencil’ we might have called him
So quick he was to wet the lead, so deft
His hand-to-mouth and tongue-flirt round the stub.
Or ‘Drench the cow’, so fierce his nostril-grab
And peel-back of her lip, so accurately forced
The bottle-neck between her big bare teeth.
Or ‘Catch the horse’, for in spite of the low-set
Cut of him, he could always slip an arm
Around the neck and fit winkers on
In a single move. But as much for the surprise
As for the truth of it, ‘Lick the pencil’
Is what it’s going to be.
II
A ‘copying pencil’, so called who knows why,
That inked itself and purpled when you licked,
About as short
As the cigarette butts in his pocket
And every bit as tangy, in constant need
Of sharpening, then of testing
On the back of his left hand, the line as bright
As bloodlines holly leaves might score
On the back of a bird-nester’s,
Indelible as the glum grey pocks
White dandelion milk
Would mark your skin with as it dried.
III
In memory of him, behold those pigmentations
Moisten and magnify to resemble marks
The day he died, the day he didn’t need
To catch the horse since the horse had come to him
Where he sat beside a path
Because, as the Vita says, ‘he was weary’.
And the horse ‘wept on his breast
So the saint’s clothes were made wet.’
Then ‘Let him, Diarmait, be,’ said Colmcille
To his attendant, ‘till he has sorrowed for me
And cried his fill.’
‘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 t
he 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.
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 since then he has published poetry, criticism and translations – including Beowulf (1999) – which have established him as one of the leading poets now at work. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. District and Circle was awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2006. Stepping Stones, a book of interviews conducted by Dennis O’Driscoll, appeared in 2008. In 2009 he received the David Cohen Prize for Literature.
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 Stanislaw Baránczak)
OPENED GROUND: POEMS 1966–1996
THE SPIRIT LEVEL
BEOWULF
ELECTRIC LIGHT
DISTRICT AND CIRCLE
THE TESTAMENT OF CRESSEID & SEVEN FABLES
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 2010
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2012
All rights reserved
© Seamus Heaney, 2010
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 978–0–571–26963–1