Song
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.
Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry on April 1939, the eldest member of a family which would eventually contain nine children. The poet has commented on the fact that his parentage thus contains both the Ireland of the cattle-herding Gaelic past and the Ulster of the Industrial Revolution; indeed, he considers this to have been a significant tension in his background, something which corresponds to another inner tension also inherited from his parents, namely that between speech and silence. His father was notably sparing of talk and his mother notably ready to speak out, a circumstance which Seamus Heaney believes to have been fundamental to the "quarrel with himself" out of which his poetry arises.
(Accessed at www.famouspoetandpoems.com)
I like the last two lines especially..."when the bird sings very close To the music of what happens." I just felt like Seamus Heaney, who has contributed so much to this city and the people of Ireland and Ulster, deserved a blog.
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.
Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry on April 1939, the eldest member of a family which would eventually contain nine children. The poet has commented on the fact that his parentage thus contains both the Ireland of the cattle-herding Gaelic past and the Ulster of the Industrial Revolution; indeed, he considers this to have been a significant tension in his background, something which corresponds to another inner tension also inherited from his parents, namely that between speech and silence. His father was notably sparing of talk and his mother notably ready to speak out, a circumstance which Seamus Heaney believes to have been fundamental to the "quarrel with himself" out of which his poetry arises.
(Accessed at www.famouspoetandpoems.com)
I like the last two lines especially..."when the bird sings very close To the music of what happens." I just felt like Seamus Heaney, who has contributed so much to this city and the people of Ireland and Ulster, deserved a blog.
