Vox Populi
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Seamus Heaney: Personal Helicon
for Michael Longley As a child, they could not keep me from wells And old pumps with buckets and windlasses. I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss. One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top. I savoured the rich crash when a bucket Plummeted down at the end of a rope. So deep you saw no reflection in it. A shallow one under a dry stone ditch Fructified like any aquarium. When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch A white face hovered over the bottom. Others had echoes, gave back your own call With a clean new music in it. And one Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection. Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime, To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
From the Internet Poetry Archive sponsored by the University of North Carolina Press and the North Carolina Arts Council. Created and edited by Paul Jones. For educational use only.
Seamus Justin Heaney (1939 – 2013) was an Irish poet, playwright and translator who received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. Among his best-known works is Death of a Naturalist (1966), his first major published volume where the poem Personal Helicon appears. Heaney was recognised as one of the principal contributors to poetry during his lifetime. Born in the townland of Tamniaran in Northern Ireland. he lived in Sandymount, Dublin, from 1976 until his death, and part-time in the United States from 1981 to 2006 where he was a professor at Harvard. He is buried at the Cemetery of St Mary’s Church, Bellaghy, Northern Ireland. The headstone bears the epitaph “Walk on air against your better judgement”, from one of his poems, “The Gravel Walks”.
Vox Populi 
Nothing more to say beyond one who’s said it all. The ancients are in communion with ser Heaney.
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Yes, they are.
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Wonder if this is available recorded. Magnificent music.
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Heaney did do many recordings of his poems. I’m guessing this one is available.
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Unless memory is fooling me (entirely possible), Heaney read at least once in Pittsburgh at The International Poetry Forum (thank you Sam Hazo) for which, I believe, recordings are archived at Carlow University.
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True!
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Thanks. Marvelous poem. Distinctively characteristic of Heaney, among the greats. Who knew, some might say, you could still do this much (when Heaney was doing it) with rhymed verse? https://www.post-gazette.com/ae/book-reviews/2006/10/08/District-and-Circle-by-Seamus-Heaney/stories/200610080170?cid=search
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I agree, Mike.
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The day Heaney died, I was in the UK. The next day, his death dominated The Guardian; it felt like something at once momentous and deeply affecting had occurred. Which it had.
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Like Yeats, Heaney was a major public figure in Ireland in a way that American poets almost never are.
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LOVE, LOVE Seamus Heaney. This is one is just so amazing in content and form. That subtle rhyme… masterly.
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A lyric genius
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yes, yes, the poem is so evocative and gorgeous — but do also look at those masterful enjambed true & slant rhymes — oh my!
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The work of a master craftsman and artist.
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What a rich poem, full of amazing diction! It gives me chills!
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Yes, I love Heaney’s poems, as you say they are rich and precise.
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