New and Selected Poems by Seamus Heaney Page B

me on to this:
How well I know that fountain, filling, running,
            although it is the night.
       
     
That eternal fountain, hidden away,
I know its haven and its secrecy
                although it is the night.
       
     
    But not its source because it does not have one,
which is all sources’ source and origin
              although it is the night.
       
     
    No other thing can be so beautiful.
Here the earth and heaven drink their fill
                although it is the night.
       
     
    So pellucid it never can be muddied,
and I know that all light radiates from it
                although it is the night.
       
     
    I know no sounding-line can find its bottom,
nobody ford or plumb its deepest fathom
                although it is the night.
       
     
    And its current so in flood it overspills
to water hell and heaven and all peoples
                    although it is the night.
       
     
    And the current that is generated there,
as far as it wills to, it can flow that far
                    although it is the night.
       
     
    And from these two a third current proceeds
which neither of these two, I know, precedes
                    although it is the night.
       
     
    This eternal fountain hides and splashes
within this living bread that is life to us
                    although it is the night.
       
     
    Hear it calling out to every creature.
And they drink these waters, although it is dark here
                    because it is the night.
       
     
    I am repining for this living fountain.
Within this bread of life I see it plain
                although it is the night.

XII
     
    Like a convalescent, I took the hand
stretched down from the jetty, sensed again
    an alien comfort as I stepped on ground
       
     
    to find the helping hand still gripping mine,
fish-cold and bony, but whether to guide
    or to be guided I could not be certain
       
     
    for the tall man in step at my side
seemed blind, though he walked straight as a rush
    upon his ash plant, his eyes fixed straight ahead.
       
     
    Then I knew him in the flesh
out there on the tarmac among the cars,
    wintered hard and sharp as a blackthorn bush.
       
     
    His voice eddying with the vowels of all rivers
came back to me, though he did not speak yet,
    a voice like a prosecutor’s or a singer’s,
       
     
    cunning, narcotic, mimic, definite
as a steel nib’s downstroke, quick and clean,
    and suddenly he hit a litter basket
       
     
    with his stick, saying, ‘Your obligation
is not discharged by any common rite.
    What you do you must do on your own.
       
     
    The main thing is to write
for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust
that imagines its haven like your hands at night
       
     
    dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.
You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.
Take off from here. And don’t be so earnest,
       
     
    so ready for the sackcloth and the ashes.
Let go, let fly, forget.
    You’ve listened long enough. Now strike your note.’
       
     
    It was as if I had stepped free into space
alone with nothing that I had not known
    already. Raindrops blew in my face
       
     
    as I came to and heard the harangue and jeers
going on and on. ‘The English language
    belongs to us. You are raking at dead fires,
       
     
    rehearsing the old whinges at your age.
That subject people stuff is a cod’s game,
    infantile, like this peasant pilgrimage.
       
     
    You lose more of yourself than you redeem
doing the decent thing. Keep at a tangent.
    When they make the circle wide, it’s time to swim
       
     
    out on your own and fill the element
with signatures on your own frequency,
    echo soundings, searches, probes, allurements,
       
     
    elver-gleams in the dark of the whole sea.’
The shower broke in a cloudburst, the tarmac
    fumed