Selected Poems 1966-1987

by Seamus Heaney

  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 lay waiting

  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 they were, as if our memory hatched them

  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