Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 3. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 29)
Péter Dolmányos: An Outline of the Relationship Between Romanticism and Contemporary Irish Poetry
ROMANTICISM AND CON TEMPORARY IRISH POETRY 13 worth. 1 The closing poem in Death of a Naturalist, 'Personal Helicon' could stand as an illustration for some of the points of this kinship. As a child, they could not keep me from wells And old pumps with buckets and windlasses. I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss. One, in a brickyard, with a rotted top. I savoured the rich crash when a bucket Plummeted down at the end of a rope. So deep you saw no reflection in it. A shallow one under a dry stone ditch Fructified like any aquarium. When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch A white face hovered over the bottom. Others had echoes, gave back your own call With a clean new music in it. And one Was scaresome for there, out of ferns and tall Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection. Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime, To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme To see myself, to set the darkness echoing. 4 The poem is a tracing of the history of the drive of self-exploration: the early interest of the child in wells and pumps is not only for their own sake. The major importance these objects bear is the fact that they keep water in their depth —and, beside of its usual association with life, the water functions like a mirror in them; yet it is a curiously artistic mirror reflecting more than sights. The 'trapped sky' is an actual image of reflection as well as an arrested moment, a potent symbol for the powers of poetry, to be discovered later, both in life and in the poem itself. 3 Corcoran, N. A Student's Guide to Seamus Heaney. London, Faber, 1986. Also: Parker, M. Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet. London: Macmillan, 1993. 4 Heaney, S. New Selected Poems 1966-1987. London: Faber, 1990, p. 9.
