Seamus Heaney and the Gifts of Nature

RTÉ Television this week presents a tribute in honor of poet Seamus Heaney's 70th birthday:

"Seamus Heaney: Out of the Marvellous explores the key personal relationship in Heaney's life, that with his wife Marie, through a fascinating interview with both of them. It also follows Heaney to Harvard, New York and London, to readings, signings and public interviews, encountering friends and colleagues such as writer and fellow Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, Pulitzer prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon, American critic Helen Vendler and Stephen Page, Chief Executive of Faber and Faber. These encounters reveal not only Heaney's gift for friendship and collegiality but also give many compelling insights into the working life of a major writer... digs deep into the rich store of Heaney's poetry to reveal key periods in his life: the raw pastoral of his childhood in Mossbawn, County Derry..."

This is one of my favorite poems by Heaney:

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.

There is a small grassroots movement afoot called "No Child Left Inside" that sprang from the thought provoking book Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv. Ella Young, an Irish poet from a time before Seamus Heaney, knew the value of Nature in all our lives. She worried that children of her day were too caught up in their "mechanical toys" and needed time to sit in the garden - to be still and to listen and to let their eyes see the smallest creature crawling beneath a leaf and the wonder of tree tops swaying against the clouds.

Oh, Ella, if you saw the toys of today and the children with ears iPod-ed against the real music of the winds and the birds and eyes that only know the illsuion of the pixelated screen how you would weep. I weep now, Ella, for the disconnected children who have never known the pure joy of wonder and the grown-ups who do not understand that our imaginations need nurturing and that comes from the stillness - from the quiet moments when our souls begin to whisper to us. How can we hear when we are so distracted...take a child into the woods or into a garden where the lady bugs build their homes...do it soon and do it often.