ocean's love to ireland
TRANSCRIPT
Ocean's Love to IrelandAuthor(s): Seamus HeaneySource: Irish University Review, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Autumn, 1974), pp. 199-200Published by: Edinburgh University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25477714 .
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Seamus Heaney
Three Poems
OCEAN'S LOVE TO IRELAND
I
Speaking broad Devonshire,
Raleigh has backed the maid to a tree
As Ireland is backed to England
And drives inland
Till all her strands are breathless :
"Sweesir, Swatter! Sweesir, Swatter!"
He is water, he is ocean, lifting Her farthingale like a scarf of weed lifting In in the hollowed back of a wave.
II
Yet his superb crest inclines to Cynthia Even while it runs its bent
In the rivers of Lee and Blackwater.
Those are the plashy spots where he would lay His cape before her. In London, his name
Will rise on water, and on these dark seepings :
Smerwick sowed with the mouthing corpses Of six hundred papists, "as gallant and good
Personages as ever were beheld."
Ill
The ruined maid complains in Irish, Ocean has scattered her dream of fleets, The Spanish prince has spilled his gold
199
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IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW
And failed her. Iambic drums
Of English beat the woods, where her poets Sink like Onan. Rush-light, mushroom-flesh,
She fades from their somnolent clasp Into ringlet-breath and dew,
The ground possessed and repossessed.
NORTH
I returned to a long strand, the hammered shod of a bay, and found only the secular
powers of the Atlantic thundering.
I faced the unmag?cal invitations of Iceland, the pathetic colonies
of Greenland, and suddenly
those fabulous raiders,
those lying in Orkney and Dublin
measured against
their long swords rusting,
those in the solid
belly of stone ships, those hacked and glinting in the gravel of thawed streams
were ocean deafened voices
warning me, lifted again in violence and epiphany.
The longship's swimming tongue
was buoyant with hindsight ?
it said Thor's hammer swung to geography and trade, thick witted couplings and revenges,
200
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