„Our shells clacked on the plates.
My tongue was a filling estuary.” (Heaney “Oysters”, 1976, p.11).
“There they were, as if our memory hatched them,
As if the unquiet founders walked again;
Two young men with rifles on the hill,
Profane and bracing as their instruments,
Who’s sorry for our trouble?
Who dreamt that we might dwell among ourselves
In rain and scoured light and wind dried stones?
Basalt, blood, water, headstones, leeches.” (Heaney “After a killing”, 1976, p.12).
“For you and yours and yours and mine fought shy,
Spoke an old language of conspirators
And could not crack the whip or seize the day:
Big-voiced scullions, herders, feelers round
Haycocks and hindquarters, talkers in byres
Slow arbitarators of the burial ground.” (Heaney “The Strand at Lough Beg”, 1976, p.17).
“I turn because the sweeping of your feet
Has stopped behind me, to find you on your knees
With blood and roadside muck in your hair and eyes,
Then kneel in front of you in brimming grass
And gather up cold handfuls of the dew
To wash you, cousin, I dab you clean with moss
Fine as the drizzle out of a low cloud.” (Heaney “The Strand at Lough Beg”, 1976, p.18).
“I loved his whole manner,
Sure-footed but too sly,
His deadpan sidling tact,
His fisherman’s quick eye
And turned observant back.
Incomprehensible
To him, my other life.
Sometimes on his high stool,
Too busy with his knife
At a tobacco plug
And not meeting my eye.
In the pause after a slug
He mentioned poetry.
We would be on our own
And, always politic
And shy of condescension
I would manage by some trick
To switch the talk to eels
Or lore of the horse and cart
Or the Provisionals.
(…)
I missed his funeral.” (Heaney “Casualty”, 1976, p.21).
“I was taken in his boat,
The screw purling, turning
Indolent fathoms white
I tasted freedom with him.
To get out early, haul
Steadily off the bottom,
Dispraise the catch, and smile
As you find a rhythm
Working you, slow mile by mile,
Into your proper haunt
Somewhere, well out, beyond …
Dawn-sniffing revenant,
Plodder through midnight rain,
Question me again.” (Heaney “Casualty”, 1976, p.24).
“So I say to myself Gweebarra
And its music hits off the place
Like water hitting off granite
I see the glittering sound.
Framed in your window,
Knives and forks set on oilcloth,
And the seals’ heads, suddenly outlined,
Scanning everything.
People here used believe
That drowned souls live in the seals.
At spring tides they might change shape.
They loved music and swam for a singer
Who might stand at the end of the summer
In the mouth of a whitewashed turf-shed,
His shoulder to the jamb, his song
A rowboat far out in evening.
When I came here first you were always singing.” (Heaney “The singer’s house”, 1976, p.27).
“He conducted the Ulster Orchestra
Like a drover with an ashplant
(…)
’How do you work?
Sometimes I just lie out
Like ballast in the bottom of the boat
Listening to the cuckoo.’” (Heaney “In Memoriam Sean O’Riada”, 1976, p.29).
“The way we are living,
Timorous or bold,
Will have been our life.” (Heaney “Elegy”, 1976, p.31).
“Two a.m., seaboard weather.
Not the proud sail of your great verse …
No. You were our night ferry
Thudding in a big sea,
The whole craft ringing
With an armourer’s music
The course set wilfully across
The ungovernable and dangerous.” (Heaney “Elegy”, 1976, p.32).
“Vowels ploughed into other: opened ground.
The mildest February for twenty years
Is mist bands over furrows, a deep no sound
Vulnerable to distant gargling tractors.
Our road is steaming, the turned-up acres breathe.
Now the good life could be to cross a field
And art a paradigm of earth new from the lathe
Of ploughs. My lea is deeply tilled.
Old ploughsocks gorge the subsoil of each sense
And I am quickened with a redolence
Of the fundamental dark unblown rose.
Wait then … Breasting the mist, in sowers’ aprons,
My ghosts come striding into their spring stations.
The dream grain whirls like freakish Easter snows.” (Heaney “Glanmore Sonnets I”, 1976, p.33).
“Sensings, mountings from the hiding places,
Words, entering almost the sense of touch
Ferreting themselves out of their dark hutch – “ (Heaney “Glanmore Sonnets II”, 1976, p.34).
“I had said earlier, ‘I won’t relapse
From this strange loneliness I’ve brought us to.
Dorothy and William-‘ She interrupts:
‘You’re not going to compare us two …?’
Outside a rustling and twig-combing breeze
Refreshes and relents. Is cadences.” (Heaney “Glanmore Sonnets III”, 1976, p.35).
“Outside the kitchen window a black rat
Sways on the briar like an infected fruit:
‘It looked me through, it stared me out, I’m not
Imagining things. Go you out to it.’
Did we come to the wilderness for this?
We have our burnished bay tree at the gate,
Classical hung with the reck of silage
From the next farm, tart-leafed as inwit.
Blood on a pitch-fork, blood on chaff and hay,
Rats speared in the sweat and dust of threshing –
What is my apology for poetry?” (Heaney “Glanmore Sonnets IX”, 1976, p.41).
“I dreamt we slept in a moss in Donegal
On turf banks under blankets, with our faces
Exposed all nights in a wetting drizzle,
Pallid as the dripping sapling birches.” (Heaney “Glanmore Sonnets X”, 1976, p.42).
“The child cried inconsolably at night.
Because his curls were long and fair
The neighbours called him la petite
And listened to him harrowing the air
That dampened their roof tiles and their vines.
At five o’clock, when the landlord’s tractor,
Familiar, ignorant and hard,
Battled and gargled in the yard,
We relished daylight in the shutter
And fell asleep.” (Heaney “High Summer”, 1976, p.45).
“When you plunged
The light of Tuscany wavered
And swung through the pool
From top to bottom.” (Heaney “The Otter”, 1976, p.47).
“After the sudden outburst and the squalls
I hooped you with my arms
And remembered that what could be contained
Inside this caliper embrace
The Dutch called bosom; and fathom
What the extended arms took in.
I have reclaimed my pro
All its salty grass and mud-slick banks;
Under fathoms of air, like an old willow
I stir a little on my creel of roots.” (Heaney “Polder”, 1976, p.51).
“A rowan like a lipsticked girl.
Between the by-road and the main road
Alder trees at a wet and dripping distance
Stand off among the rushes.
There are the mud-flowers of dialect
And the immortelles of perfect pitch
And that moment when the bird sings very close
To the music of what happens.” (Heaney “Song”, 1976, p.56).
“As you plaited the harvest bow
You implicated the mellowed silence in you
In wheat that does not rust
But brightens as it tightens twist by twist
Into a knowable corona,
A throwaway love-knot of straw.
(…)
The end of art is peace.
Could be the motto of this frail device.” (Heaney “Song”, 1976, p.58).
