#glanmore sonnets

[soulmaking]

Seamus Heaney, from "Glanmore Sonnets"

[severinwoolf]

My ghosts come striding into their spring stations// The dream grain whirls like freakish Easter snows.

Seamus Heaney, Glanmore Sonnets

[ancestorsalive]

He lived there in the unsayable light. He saw the fuchsia in a drizzling noon, The elderflowers at dusk like a risen moon And green fields greying on the windswept heights.

Seamus Heaney

“It seems appropriate that the elder is under the sign of Venus. When you begin working with its aromatic blooms, it’s easy to understand why the elder means purification and love in the language of flowers. In fact, when standing amid an elder in full bloom, one almost feels the presence of the goddess Venus herself.

Fittingly, the delicate flower helps women remain beautiful; it has been used since ancient Egyptian times for reducing wrinkles and age spots. It also inspired the poet Seamus Heaney when he wrote his Glanmore Sonnets.

Shamans and medicine people worldwide believed elder was a healing plant and commonly used it for upper respiratory ailments and topically for skin problems. Traditionally, our herbalist elders, such as Hippocrates, Dioscorides, and Pliney the Elder recognized its strength as a diuretic, diaphoretic, anti-inflammatory, anti-bacterial, and more. Recent research from Israel and the United Kingdom has confirmed some of these claims.

Elder has long been a human ally, both as medicine and as food.” Source: https://theherbalacademy.com/10-elderflower-recipes-and-remedies/

Photo: Dajana Heremic

[writinginnorthnorfolk]

Losing the Sounds of Spring

Vowels ploughed into other: opened ground.The mildest February for twenty yearsIs mist bands over furrows, a deep no soundVulnerable to distant gargling tractors.                                                 Seamus Heaney In the north, the Plough is ridden by the moonand frost continues to clench the earth.On this early morning walk there are no words,no lines from puffs of frozen breath…

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[rosecook]

Seamus Heaney - Glanmore Sonnets, VII

Glanmore Sonnets, VII Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Irish Sea:Green, swift upsurges, North Atlantic fluxConjured by that strong gale-warning voiceCollapse into a sibilant penumbra.Midnight and closedown. Sirens of the tundra,Of eel-road, seal-road, keel-road, whale-road, raiseTheir wind-compounded keen behind the baizeAnd drive the trawlers to the lee of Wicklow.L’Étoile, Le Guillemot, La Belle…

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[appointmentwithmryeats]

Glanmore Sonnets

BY SEAMUS HEANEY

For Ann Saddlemyer,

our heartiest welcomer

I

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 farmland as a 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.

II

Sensings, mountings from the hiding places,

Words entering almost the sense of touch

Ferreting themselves out of their dark hutch—

‘These things are not secrets but mysteries,’

Oisin Kelly told me years ago

In Belfast, hankering after stone

That connived with the chisel, as if the grain

Remembered what the mallet tapped to know.

Then I landed in the hedge-school of Glanmore

And from the backs of ditches hoped to raise

A voice caught back off slug-horn and slow chanter

That might continue, hold, dispel, appease:

Vowels ploughed into other, opened ground,

Each verse returning like the plough turned round.

III

This evening the cuckoo and the corncrake

(So much, too much) consorted at twilight.

It was all crepuscular and iambic.

Out on the field a baby rabbit

Took his bearings, and I knew the deer

(I’ve seen them too from the window of the house,

Like connoisseurs, inquisitive of air)

Were careful under larch and May-green spruce.

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.

IV

I used to lie with an ear to the line

For that way, they said, there should come a sound

Escaping ahead, an iron tune

Of flange and piston pitched along the ground,

But I never heard that. Always, instead,

Struck couplings and shuntings two miles away

Lifted over the woods. The head

Of a horse swirled back from a gate, a grey

Turnover of haunch and mane, and I’d look

Up to the cutting where she’d soon appear.

Two fields back, in the house, small ripples shook

Silently across our drinking water

(As they are shaking now across my heart)

And vanished into where they seemed to start.

V

Soft corrugations in the boortree’s trunk,

Its green young shoots, its rods like freckled solder:

It was our bower as children, a greenish, dank

And snapping memory as I get older.

And elderberry I have learned to call it.

I love its blooms like saucers brimmed with meal,

Its berries a swart caviar of shot,

A buoyant spawn, a light bruised out of purple.

Elderberry? It is shires dreaming wine.

Boortree is bower tree, where I played ‘touching tongues’

And felt another’s texture quick on mine.

So, etymologist of roots and graftings,

I fall back to my tree-house and would crouch

Where small buds shoot and flourish in the hush.

VI

He lived there in the unsayable lights.

He saw the fuchsia in a drizzling noon,

The elderflower at dusk like a risen moon

And green fields greying on the windswept heights.

‘I will break through,’ he said, ‘what I glazed over

With perfect mist and peaceful absences’—

Sudden and sure as the man who dared the ice

And raced his bike across the Moyola River.

A man we never saw. But in that winter

Of nineteen forty-seven, when the snow

Kept the country bright as a studio,

In a cold where things might crystallize or founder,

His story quickened us, a wild white goose

Heard after dark above the drifted house.

VII

Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Irish Sea:

Green, swift upsurges, North Atlantic flux

Conjured by that strong gale-warning voice,

Collapse into a sibilant penumbra.

Midnight and closedown. Sirens of the tundra,

Of eel-road, seal-road, keel-road, whale-road, raise

Their wind-compounded keen behind the baize

And drive the trawlers to the lee of Wicklow.

L’Etoile, Le Guillemot, La Belle Hélène

Nursed their bright names this morning in the bay

That toiled like mortar. It was marvellous

And actual, I said out loud, ‘A haven,’

The word deepening, clearing, like the sky

Elsewhere on Minches, Cromarty, The Faroes.

VIII

Thunderlight on the split logs: big raindrops

At body heat and lush with omen

Spattering dark on the hatchet iron.

This morning when a magpie with jerky steps

Inspected a horse asleep beside the wood

I thought of dew on armour and carrion.

What would I meet, blood-boltered, on the road?

How deep into the woodpile sat the toad?

What welters through this dark hush on the crops?

Do you remember that pension in Les Landes

Where the old one rocked and rocked and rocked

A mongol in her lap, to little songs?

Come to me quick, I am upstairs shaking.

My all of you birchwood in lightning.

IX

Outside the kitchen window a black rat

Sways on the briar like 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 reek of silage

From the next farm, tart-leafed as inwit.

Blood on a pitchfork, blood on chaff and hay,

Rats speared in the sweat and dust of threshing—

What is my apology for poetry?

The empty briar is swishing

When I come down, and beyond, inside, your face

Haunts like a new moon glimpsed through tangled glass.

X

I dreamt we slept in a moss in Donegal

On turf banks under blankets, with our faces

Exposed all night in a wetting drizzle,

Pallid as the dripping sapling birches.

Lorenzo and Jessica in a cold climate.

Diarmuid and Grainne waiting to be found.

Darkly asperged and censed, we were laid out

Like breathing effigies on a raised ground.

And in that dream I dreamt—how like you this?—

Our first night years ago in that hotel

When you came with your deliberate kiss

To raise us towards the lovely and painful

Covenants of flesh; our separateness;

The respite in our dewy dreaming faces.

CREDITS

Seamus Heaney, "Glanmore Sonnets" from Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996. Used by permission of Faber & Faber. All rights reserved.

[writinginnorthnorfolk]

Sounding Out Spring

Vowels ploughed into other: opened ground.The mildest February for twenty yearsIs mist bands over furrows, a deep no soundVulnerable to distant gargling tractors. Seamus Heaney In the north, the Ploughis ridden by the moonand frost continuesto clench the earth.Early morning walkingwakens words,enlivens lines from puffsof frozen breath,vowels ploughed into other: opened ground. Punctuated by…

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[luthienne]

When you came with your deliberate kiss To raise us towards the lovely and painful Covenants of flesh; our separateness; The respite in our dewy dreaming faces.

Seamus Heaney, from Opened Ground