Selected Poems of Seamus Heaney

• “And then when he thought of probes that reached the farthest, / He would see the shaft of a pitchfork sailing past / Evenly, imperturbably through space, / Its prongs starlit and absolutely soundless - // But has learned at last to follow that simple lead / Past its own aim, out to an other side / Where perfection - or nearness to it - is imagined / Not in the aiming but the opening hand.” (Pitchfork)
• The opening hand… starting with the pitchfork as a weapon of sorts, direct, vivid material imagery, and then the mystical tilt at the end, the relaxing of grip and letting go of the weapon
• “Like a gorged cormorant on the rock at noon, / Exiled and in tune with the big glitter. // Re-enter this as the adult of solitude, / The silence-forder and the definite / Presence you senses withdrawing the first time round.” (Settings, xiii)

“Hoard and praise the verity of gravel.

Gems for the undeluded. Milt of earth.

It’s plain, champing song against the shovel

Soundtests and sandblasts words like ‘honest worth’.

Beautiful in or out of the river,

The kingdom of gravel was inside you too - Deep down, far back, clear water running over Pebbles of caramel, hailstone, mackerel-blue.” (Gravel Walks)

• The clear stream of sprite pouring over bodily gravel. Verity in the immanent!

“Leonardo said: the sun has never

Seen a shadow. Now watch the sculptor move Full circle round her next work, like a lover

In the sphere of shifting angles and fixed love.”

(Poet’s Chair)

At the Wellhead

Your songs, when you sing them with your two eyes closed

As you always do, are like a local road

We’ve known every turn of in the past —

• The unselfconscious voice reminds us of a local road we’ve always known (anamnesis)

…

Sing yourself to where the singing comes from,

Ardent and cut off like our blind neighbour

Who played the piano all day in her bedroom.

Her notes came out to us like hoisted water

Ravelling off a bucket at the wellhead

Where next thing we’d be listening, hushed and awkward.

• To sing ourselves to the source of singing, back to the wellhead

*

That blind-from-birth, sweet-voiced, withdrawn musician

Was like a silver vein in heavy clay.

Night water glittering in the light of day.

But also just our neighbour, Rosie Keenan.

…

…her eyes were full

Of open darkness and a watery shine.

• Like the sky at the bottom of the well.

She knew us by our voices. She’d say she ‘saw’

Whoever or whatever. Being with her

Was intimate and helpful, like a cure

You didn’t notice happening. When I read

A poem with Keenan’s well in it, she said,

‘I can see the sky at the bottom of it now.’

• Coincidence of opposites, the muse that ‘sees’ oneness.

Postscript

…

You are neither here nor there,

A hurry through which known and strange things pass

As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways

And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

Lupins

They stood. And stood for something. Just by standing.

In waiting. Unavailable. But there

For sure. Sure and unbending.

Rose-fingered dawn’s and navy midnight’s flower.

Seed packets to begin with, pink and azure,

Sifting lightness and small jittery promise:

Lupin spires, erotics of the future,

Lip-brush of the blue and earth’s deep purchase.

O pastel turrets, pods and tapering stalks

That stood their ground for all our summer wending

And even when they blanched would never balk.

And none of this surpassed our understanding.

Album

…

Too late, alas, now for the apt quotation

About a love that’s proved by steady gazing 

Not at each other but in the same direction.

Chanson d’Aventure

Love’s mysteries in souls do grow, But yet the body is his book. (The Ecstasy, John Donne)