In other news, I will once again be keeping with an All Hallows theme this month, as I have for the past few years, so you can expect a bit more of the dark to be showing up. My muse has been absent without leave a lot lately, but I will post whenever she deigns to cooperate.
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Without further ado, then, here is Emily Dickinson on the Off The Shelf Page, and below, last month's selection Personal Helicon, by Seamus Heaney, for a last persual:
Personal Helicon
for Michael Longley
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 board 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.
~Seamus Heaney
ever furthering my education...rather like the last line of this...setting the darkness to echoing...we always had a well house so it was covered over...as a kid i might have crawled in a well to see where it went so probably good we did not have one...
ReplyDeleteA beautiful poem and itself rather All Hallows' y--thanks for the revisit. He is so wonderful textural and sensual in terms of smells, sounds--as well as poetic. I am sorry about your muse. Travails continue on my end - awful. Am getting near end of some tether. Perhaps there is something in the air! Take care. k.
ReplyDeletean excellent chestnut
ReplyDeleteBrilliant. Just brilliant. My muse is also MIA recently. Perhaps they are off together having such wild and wicked adventures as befit the season.
ReplyDeletewonderful share, I had not read this one. it is stirring things around in my thoughts and senses.
ReplyDeleteThis is a damp, dark piece of work. I like it.
ReplyDeleteDarker than usual in October?
ReplyDelete(Clutches a Rosary and shivers)