Alphabets

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Alphabets

by Seamus Heaney

I

A shadow his father makes with joined hands

And thumbs and fingers nibbles on the wall

Like a rabbit’s head. He understands

He will understand more when he goes to school.

There he draws smoke with chalk the whole first week,

Then draws the forked stick that they call a Y.

This is writing. A swan’s neck and swan’s back

Make the 2 he can see now as well as say.

Two rafters and a cross-tie on the slate

Are the letter some call ah, some call ay.

There are charts, there are headlines, there is a right

Way to hold the pen and a wrong way.

First it is ‘copying out’, and the ‘English’

Marked correct with a little leaning hoe.

Smells of inkwells rise in the classroom hush.

A globe in the window tilts like a coloured O.

II

Declensions sang on a air like a hosanna

As, column after stratified column,

Book one of Elementa Latina,

Marbled and minatory, rose up to him.

For he was fostered next in a stricter school

Named for the patron saint of the oak wood

Where classes switched to the pealing of a bell

And he left the Latin forum for the shade

Of new calligraphy that felt like home.

The letters of this alphabets were trees.

The capitals were orchards in full bloom,

The lines of script like briars coiled in ditches.

Here in her snooded garment and bare feet,

All ringleted in assonance and woodnotes,

The poet’s dream stole over him like sunlight

And passed into the tenebrous thickets.

He learns this other writing. He is the scribe

Who drove a team of quills on his white field.

Round his cell door the blackbirds dart and dab.

Then self-denial, fasting, the pure cold.

By rules that hardened the farther they reached north

He bends to his desk and begins again.

Christ’s sickle has been in the undergrowth.

The script grows bare and Merovingian.

III

The globe has spun. He stands in a wooden O.

He alludes to Shakespeare. He alludes to Graves.

Time has bulldozed the school and school window.

Balers drop bales like printouts where stooked sheaves

Made lambdas on the stubble once at harvest

And the delta face of each potato pit

Was patted straight and moulded against frost.

All gone, with the omega that kept

Watch above each door, the good luck horse-shoe.

Yet shape-note language absolute on air

As Constantine’s sky-lettered IN HOC SIGNO

Can still command him; or the necromancer

Who would hang from the domed ceiling of his house

A figure of the world with colours in it

So that the figure of the universe

And ‘not just single things’ would meet his sight

When he walked abroad. As from his small window

The astronaut sees all he has sprung from,

The risen, aqueous, singular, lucent O

Like a magnified and buoyant ovum –

Or like my own wide pre-reflective stare

All agog at the plasterer on his ladder

Skimming our gable and writing our name there

With his trowel point, letter by strange letter.