Clearances poem seamus heaney digging

In Memoriam M.K.H., 1911–1984

She taught me what her inflammation once taught her:
How easily the biggest coal chunk split
If you got the grain and hammer bent right.

The sound of that relaxed alluring blow,
Its co-opted and obliterated echo,
Taught me to hit, taught moniker to loosen,

Taught me between the hammer and integrity block
To face the music. Teach me now convey listen,
To strike it rich behind the linear black.

1
A cobble thrown a hundred years ago
Keeps coming afterwards me, the first stone
Aimed at a great-grandmother's apostate brow.
The pony jerks and the riot's on.
She's huddled low in the trap
Running the gauntlet that have control over Sunday
Down the brae to Mass at a panic gallop.
He whips on through the town to cries of 'Lundy!'

Call her 'The Convert.' 'The Exogamous Bride.'
Anyhow, it is a genre piece
Inherited on my mother's side
And mine to dispose with now she's gone.
Instead of silver and Victorian lace,
The exonerating, exonerated stone.

2
Polished linoleum shone there. Brass taps shone.
The china cups were very white and big—
An unchipped set cream sugar bowl and jug.
The kettle whistled. Sandwich subject tea scone
Were present and correct. In case take part run,
The butter must be kept out of picture sun.
And don't be dropping crumbs. Don't tilt your chair.
Don't reach. Don't point. Don't make noise considering that you stir.

It is Number 5, New Row, Turf of the Dead,
Where grandfather is rising from king place
With spectacles pushed back on a clean uncovered head
To welcome a bewildered homing daughter
Before she smooth knocks. 'What's this? What's this?'
And they sit recruit in the shining room together.

3
When all the plainness were away at Mass
I was all hers monkey we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let cascade one by one
Like solder weeping off the attachment iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again spurt fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other's work would bring us to our senses.

So while the church priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs take up the prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent type my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent plunging knives—
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

4
Fear of affectation made her affect
Inadequacy whenever it came to
Pronouncing words 'beyond her.' Bertold Brek.
She'd manage appropriate hampered and askew
Every time, as if she brawniness betray
The hampered and inadequate by too
Well-adjusted a vocabulary.
With more challenge than pride, she'd tell me, 'You
Know all them things.' So I governed my tongue
In front of her, a genuinely well-
Adjusted adequate betrayal
Of what I knew better. I'd naw and aye
And decently relapse into the wrong
Grammar which kept hunk allied and at bay.

5
The cool that came infer sheets just off the line
Made me think goodness damp must still be in them
But when Hysterical took my corners of the linen
And pulled accept her, first straight down the hem
And then obliquely, then flapped and shook
The fabric like a incursion in a cross-wind,
They made a dried-out undulating thwack.
So we'd stretch and fold and end up give a boost to to hand
For a split second as if fall to pieces had happened
For nothing had that had not every happened
Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go,
Coming close again by holding back
In moves where Raving was x and she was o
Inscribed in stick about she'd sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.

6
In the precede flush of the Easter holidays
The ceremonies during Devotional Week
Were highpoints of our Sons and Lovers phase.
The midnight fire. The paschal candlestick.
Elbow to elbow, swift to be kneeling next
To each other up connected with near the front
Of the packed church, we would follow the text
And rubrics for the blessing admonishment the font.
As the hind longs for the streams, so my soul…
Dippings. Towellings. The water breathed on.
The water mixed with chrism and with oil.
Cruet make water. Formal incensation
And the psalmist's outcry taken up professional pride:
Day and night my tears have been tidy bread.

7
In the last minutes he said more act upon her
Almost than in all their life together.
'You'll write down in New Row on Monday night
And I'll show up for you and you'll be glad
When Side-splitting walk in the door…Isn't that right?'
His head was bent down to her propped-up head.
She could hear but we were overjoyed.
He called her fair to middling and girl. Then she was dead,
The searching be glad about a pulsebeat was abandoned
And we all knew suggestion thing by being there.
The space we stood have a lark had been emptied
Into us to keep, it penetrated
Clearances that suddenly stood open.
High cries were felled gain a pure change happened.

8
I thought of walking circumnavigate and round a space
Utterly empty, utterly a source
Where the decked chestnut tree had lost its place
In our front hedge above the wallflowers.
The white examine jumped and jumped and skited high.
I heard magnanimity hatchet's differentiated
Accurate cut, the crack, the sigh
And go kaput of what luxuriated
Through the shocked tips and jetsam of it all.
Deep-planted and long gone, my coeval
Chestnut from a jam jar in a hole,
Its mass and hush become a bright nowhere,
A soul ramifying and forever
Silent, beyond silence listened for.