Heaney's Windermere
Shaun Castle 05 June 2006
Seamus Heaney’s new collection unites the three themes that dominate his poetry - the past, death and myth. Two poems address the Lakes, and Dorothy and William Wordsworth in particular, A Scuttle for Dorothy Wordsworth and Wordsworth’s Skates. Against the mitigating forces turning the Lakes into a museum piece, Heaney squares up the past to “now”. In Heaney’s perspective, past poets are as alive as the living, and have indelibly changed the way the living see. The poem about Wordsworths ice skates, on display in a glass case, dismisses their dusty material reality, and switches attention instead to their counterparts in the Prelude, which “flashed from the clutch of earth” and left a lasting mark on the world. Like all good poetry, Heaney, remembering Yeats too, injects “buried men/Back in the human mind again”.
Wordsworth’s Skates
Star in the window.
Slate scrape. Bird or branch?Or the whet and scud of steel on placid ice?
Not the bootless runners lying toppled
In dust in a display case,
Their bindings perished,
But the reel of them on frozen Windermere
As he flashed from the clutch of earth along its curve
And left it scored.
From District and Circle by Seamus Heaney
(Faber and Faber, 2006) Links to this post
