This weeks top Irish poem is number 40 titled Personal Helicon by Seamus Heaney.
In this great poem, Seamus Heaney takes us back to a simpler time. A time when he was happy out playing by a well. It is a shorter poem but Seamus has great use of imagery. In fact, you are almost transported back to his childhood through his words.
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Personal Helicon, by Seamus Heaney
I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
Personal Helicon is the closing poem of Death of a Naturalist, Heaney’s first collection (Faber, 1966), and it is dedicated to his friend and fellow poet Michael Longley. Helicon is the mountain in Greek myth where the springs of the Muses rose, the traditional source of a poet’s inspiration.
Heaney’s own springs are much humbler: the wells of the Derry countryside where he grew up. He remembers them one by one, each with its own depth, smell and sound, some magical and some a little frightening. These are the things a child soaks up without knowing why they matter.
At the end he admits a grown man can no longer go poking about in wells, so he writes poems instead. Poetry becomes his way of looking down into the dark and hearing something come back. It works as a small manifesto at the close of his first book: the ordinary, earthy world of rural Ireland is where his poems come from.
We have not found an authorised copy of the full poem online. You will find it in Death of a Naturalist (Faber).
Thanks for reading. And check out my top 100 Irish poems list here.