Seamus Heaney

THE eyes first. Kind, brown, narrowing as they smiled. Eyes that had squinted into wind and through smoke: that had seen a river rat “tracing its wet/Arcs on the stones”, wind “quicksilvering” a poplar in one sweep, a cut finger “swaying its red spoors through a basin”. Then the hands: big, red, with squared-off nails. Not a poet’s hands. These had paid out rope in long loops, taking the strain; had dressed a hay-ruck and combed it down; had felt the tug and strum of a fishing line in a river. When they switched to poem-work, his pen (the faithful Conway-Stewart, guttering and snorkelling its full draught of ink) became another tool in a long succession of them: the heavy spade, slicing and nicking the turf with its clean plate-edge; the “rightness and lightness” of pitchfork and rake; the sledgehammer’s gathered force, “so unanswerably landed/The staked earth quailed and shivered in the handle”. “Do not waver/Into language,” he wrote. “Do not waver in it.”