For a real treat, click the link* to hear the poem read aloud by the Mr. Heaney himself.

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.

This poem always makes me want to talk to other writers. Helicon is the mountain where the Muses made their home. Mr. Heaney speaks of finding his inspiration by probing the deep, dank places in the same way that he, as a child, explored the inky depths of forgotten wells. Sometimes, peering down into the darkness, he discovers his own reflection. Sometimes his voice comes back to him with a “clean new music” in it—that is the part that gets me. My own muse seldom lurks in the dark places (though I think my best book is the one in which certain experiences of loss and suffering informed my understanding of how Martha, as a mother, could experience terrible loss and not be crushed by it); for me, the “clean new music” rings from the eager faces of my children, my husband’s wry grin, the toes of a newborn, the cloud-shadows on our green hills.

Where is your personal Helicon?

*About the Internet Poetry Archive: “The University of North Carolina Press joins the UNC Office of Information Technology in publishing the Internet Poetry Archive. The archive makes available over a worldwide computer network selected poems from a number of contemporary poets. The goal of the project is to make poetry accessible to new audiences (at little or no cost) and to give teachers and students of poetry new ways of presenting and studying these poets and their texts.”

One of the treasures made available at this site is a recording and transcript of Seamus Heaney’s 1995 Nobel Lecture, “Crediting Poetry.” An excerpt:

To begin with, I wanted that truth to life to possess a concrete reliability, and rejoiced most when the poem seemed most direct, an upfront representation of the world it stood in for or stood up for or stood its ground against. Even as a schoolboy, I loved John Keats’s ode “To Autumn” for being an ark of the covenant between language and sensation; as an adolescent, I loved Gerard Manley Hopkins for the intensity of his exclamations which were also equations for a rapture and an ache I didn’t fully know I knew until I read him; I loved Robert Frost for his farmer’s accuracy and his wily down-to-earthness; and Chaucer too for much the same reasons. Later on I would find a different kind of accuracy, a moral down-to-earthness to which I responded deeply and always will, in the war poetry of Wilfred Owen, a poetry where a New Testament sensibility suffers and absorbs the shock of the new century’s barbarism. Then later again, in the pure consequence of Elizabeth Bishop’s style, in the sheer obduracy of Robert Lowell’s and in the barefaced confrontation of Patrick Kavanagh’s, I encountered further reasons for believing in poetry’s ability – and responsibility – to say what happens, to “pity the planet,” to be “not concerned with Poetry.”

More Poetry Friday contributions:
Big A little a
Chicken Spaghetti
Book Buds
Scholar’s Blog
Fuse #8 Productions
The Simple and the Ordinary
bookshelves of doom
Jen Robinson’s Books Page—a poem by Emily of New Moon!
Farm School
A Chair, A Fireplace, and a Tea Cozy
Gotta Book
Once upon a time there was a girl who wanted to write
So Glad I’m Here
Mungo’s Mathoms
Blog from the Windowsill—I really enjoyed this review of two books about poetic form.

Did I miss anyone?

As promised, the poem that inspired the title of my new ClubMom blog:

Fern Hill
by Dylan Thomas

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

The poem is still under copyright so you’ll have to click through to read the rest. It’s worth your time. Every line quivers like a plucked cello string; I think it resonates all the more now that childhood is so rarely as “green and carefree” as Thomas portrays it. Today’s overscheduled, overplugged children seldom have time to “run their heedless ways” amid the daisies and the barley.

“Fern Hill” is a poignant meditation on how fleeting are the golden, magical, carefree days of childhood. The poem ends with a reminder that time had a hold on that long-ago boy from the beginning, even as he ran around the farmyard, oblivious of his own mortality, under a sun that seemed brand new:

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

But to be chained like the sea is hardly a bondage! As the sea sings its rhythms in accord with the turning of the earth and the moon, so does the poet’s soul sing in celebration of the treasure of a carefree youth—even as he acknowledges that we are dying from the moment we are born. He savored his boyhood then and he savors it now, every bright detail: the “horses flashing into the dark,” the “new made clouds,” the calves singing to his horn while

the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.

Other Poetry Friday contributors: founder Big A little a, Farm School, Chicken Spaghetti, Jen Robinson’s Book Page, The Simple and the Ordinary, Mungo’s Mathoms, bookshelves of doom, Book Buds, Bartography, Mother Reader, Slayground, Scholar’s Blog, A Chair, a Fireplace, and a Tea Cozy

Children Selecting Books in a Library
by Randall Jarrell

With beasts and gods, above, the wall is bright.
The child’s head, bent to the book-colored shelves,
Is slow and sidelong and food-gathering,
Moving in blind grace…yet from the mural, Care
The grey-eyed one, fishing the morning mist,
Seizes the baby hero by the hair
And whispers, in the tongue of gods and children,
Words of a doom as ecumenical as dawn
But blanched like dawn, with dew.
The children’s cries
Are to men the cries of crickets, dense with warmth
—But dip a finger into Fafnir, taste it,
And all their words are plain as chance and pain.
Their tales are full of sorcerers and ogres
Because their lives are: the capricious infinite
That, like parents, no one has yet escaped
Except by luck or magic; and since strength
And wit are useless, be kind or stupid, wait
Some power’s gratitude, the tide of things.
Read meanwhile…hunt among the shelves, as dogs do, grasses,
And find one cure for Everychild’s diseases
Beginning: Once upon a time there was
A wolf that fed, a mouse that warned, a bear that rode
A boy. Us men, alas! wolves, mice, bears bore.
And yet wolves, mice, bears, children, gods and men
In slow preambulation up and down the shelves
Of the universe are seeking…who knows except themselves?
What some escape to, some escape: if we find Swann’s
Way better than our own, and trudge on at the back
Of the north wind to—to—somewhere east
Of the sun, west of the moon, it is because we live
By trading another’s sorrow for our own; another’s
Impossibilities, still unbelieved in, for our own…
“I am myself still?” For a little while, forget:
The world’s selves cure that short disease, myself,
And we see bending to us, dewy-eyed, the great
CHANGE, dear to all things not to themselves endeared.

Other Poetry Friday contributors: founder Big A little a, Farm School, Chicken Spaghetti, Jen Robinson’s Book Page, The Simple and the Ordinary, A Fuse #8 Production, Mungo’s Mathoms, bookshelves of doom, Blog from the Windowsill, Book Buds

Kelly over at Big A little a started a custom of sharing favorite poems on our blogs every Friday. For my contribution this week, I have something special: a poem written by 12-year-old Agnes G., which her mother shared with readers at The Cottage Garden yesterday.

The sunset shattered into shards of stars,
A million fish within a velvet sea,
A million angels in a heaven of clouds,
A million eyes, all staring out at me.

For the sun is a brand whose ceaseless burning
Illuminates all of the daytime sky,
But the moon is gentler, humbly turning
The nighttime over to the stars on high.

Other Poetry Friday contributions: Big A little a with some hilarious stanzas from Thelonius Monster’s Sky-High Fly Pie, a book I can’t wait to check out, Chicken Spaghetti, Farm School, A Fuse #8 Production, Scholar’s Blog, Mungo’s Mathoms, A Chair, A Fireplace, and a Tea Cozy, Blog from the Windowsill, and The Simple and the Ordinary.