Seamus Heaney - New Selected Poems 1988–2013

1. from Seeing Things (1991)
2. from The Spirit Level (1996)
3. from Electric Light (2001)
4. from District and Circle (2006)
5. from Human Chain (2010)

But to retrace your steps and get back to upper air, This is the real task and the real undertaking. A few have been able to do it, sons of the gods Favoured by Jupiter Justus, or exalted to heaven In a blaze of heroic glory. Forests spread half-way down And Cocytus winds through the dark, licking its banks. Still, if love torments you so much and you so much desire To sail the Stygian lake twice and twice to inspect The underworld dark, if you must go beyond whats permitted, Understand what you must do beforehand. Hidden in the thick of a tree is a bough made of gold And its leaves and pliable twigs are made of it too. It is sacred to underworld Juno, who is its patron, And overtopped by a grove where deep shadows mass Along far wooded valleys.

No one is ever permitted To go down into earths hidden places unless he has first Plucked this golden-fledged tree-branch out of its tree And bestowed it on fair Proserpina, to whom it belongs By decree, her own special gift. And when it is plucked A second one grows in its place, golden once more, And the foliage growing upon it glimmers the same. Therefore look up and search deep and when you have found it Take hold of it boldly and duly. If fate has called you The bough will come away easily, of its own sweet accord. Otherwise, no matter how much strength you muster, you wont Ever manage to quell it or fell it with the toughest of blades.

The dry-eyed Latin word Is perfect for the carved stone of the water Where Jesus stands up to his unwet knees And John the Baptist pours out more water Over his head: all this in bright sunlight On the faade of a cathedral. Lines Hard and thin and sinuous represent The flowing river. Down between the lines Little antic fish are all go. Nothing else. And yet in that utter visibility The stones alive with whats invisible: Waterweed, stirred sand-grains hurrying off, The shadowy, unshadowed stream itself.

He had gone to spray Potatoes in a field on the riverbank And wouldnt bring me with him. The horse-sprayer Was too big and new-fangled, bluestone might Burn me in the eyes, the horse was fresh, I Might scare the horse, and so on. I threw stones At a bird on the shed roof, as much for The clatter of the stones as anything, But when he came back, I was inside the house And saw him out the window, scatter-eyed And daunted, strange without his hat, His step unguided, his ghosthood immanent. When he was turning on the riverbank, The horse had rusted and reared up and pitched Cart and sprayer and everything off balance So the whole rig went over into a deep Whirlpool, hoofs, chains, shafts, cartwheels, barrel And tackle, all tumbling off the world, And the hat already merrily swept along The quieter reaches. That afternoon I saw him face to face, he came to me With his damp footprints out of the river, And there was nothing between us there That might not still be happily ever after.