M Ismail
Seamus Heaney’s Glanmore Sonnets are a remarkable collection of poems that intertwine themes of love, nature, and introspection. Written during a period of retreat to Glanmore Cottage in County Wicklow, Ireland, these sonnets reflect Heaney’s deep connection to his wife, Marie, and the tranquil countryside that surrounded them. The Glanmore Sonnets stand as a tribute to love in its most enduring and intimate form.
A Retreat to Glanmore
Heaney composed these sonnets while seeking solace and inspiration in the rural setting of Glanmore Cottage. This retreat allowed him to reflect on his life, relationships, and the world around him. The peaceful environment of County Wicklow served as the perfect backdrop for these contemplative poems, where personal experience met universal themes.
Themes of Love and Partnership
At the heart of the Glanmore Sonnets lies the theme of love—not just romantic love, but a deeper, enduring partnership. Heaney’s relationship with his wife is beautifully portrayed through moments of shared joy and mutual understanding. The sonnets capture their bond through vivid imagery and heartfelt language, painting a picture of companionship that transcends time.
Nature as a Reflection of Love
The natural world plays a significant role in the sonnets, symbolizing the harmony and balance within Heaney’s marriage. The lush landscapes of Glanmore mirror the richness of their relationship, with references to seasons, growth, and renewal serving as metaphors for enduring love.
Literary Craftsmanship
The Glanmore Sonnets showcase Heaney’s mastery of poetic form. Written as traditional sonnets, they maintain a rhythmic structure that enhances their lyrical quality. Heaney’s use of vivid imagery and metaphor brings the sonnets to life, making ordinary moments—like shared walks or quiet evenings—resonate with profound meaning.
Legacy and Impact
The Glanmore Sonnets have been celebrated for their emotional depth and literary brilliance. They reflect Heaney’s ability to weave personal experiences into poetry that speaks to universal themes. These sonnets also played a role in cementing Heaney’s reputation as one of the greatest poets of his time, contributing to his recognition as a Nobel Laureate in Literature in 1995.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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