SEAMUS HEANEY
He dwelt in himself
like a rook in an unroofed tower.
To get close I had to maintain
a climb up deserted ramparts
and not flin ch, not raise an eye
to
search for an eye on the watch
from hi s coign of seclusion .
Deliberately he would unclasp
his book of withholding
a page at a time and it was nothing
arcane, just th e old rules
we all had insc ribed on o ur slates.
Each character blocked on the parchment secure
in its volume and measure.
Each maxim given its space.
Tell the trllth. Do /l ot be afraid.
Durabl e, obstinate notions,
like qu arrymen's hammers and wedges proofed
by intransigent se rvice.
Like coping stones where yo u rest
in the balm of the wellspring.
How flimsy I fel t climbing down
th e unrail ed stairs on the wa ll ,
hearing the purpose and venture
in a w ing-flap above me.
47
Quite often, ea rl y Iri sh poems are written by monks in th e Irish lan–
guage, in the margins of the manuscripts of Latin gospels. So you have the
two cultures, the native Druidic inheritance, and th en the Mediterranean,
the Christian, both of which are present in thi s next poem, called
"Alphabets." It was influ enced by the translation of "The World ," Milosz's
poem of the 1940s, and was written at Harvard in 1984 for the Phi Beta
Kappa exercises. Tradi tionally the poem for the Phi Beta Kappa exe rcises
is a poem about learning. This is about learning in th e primal sense, about
learning to write, to form th e letters on a slate or a page. Then at the sec–
ondary school in Derry, which is th e school of Doire, the oak wood, and
the school of Saint Columb who was the scribe, I lea rned the Irish lan–
guage, the Iri sh scri pt, and I also learned Latin. The letter
0
has a sort of
structural fun ction; the poem begins with it, the first section ends with the
o
of the globe, and the las t section ends with an as tronaut seeing the planet
