A speech all toys and carpentry

Posted Christmas eve, Thursday, December 24, 2020.

Detail from “Winter Above Ligoniel” by Frederick W. Hall. Courtesy of the Ulster Museum, the National Museums Northern Ireland, via ArtUK.

The uniform, the gun, Ulster---it’s a poem about the Troubles. But Heaney doesn’t mean us to forget who else was a carpenter and in whose path Eric Dawson pedaled his bike…

The bare bulb, a scatter of nails,
Shelved timber, glinting chisels:
In a shed of corrugated iron
Eric Dawson stoops to his plane

At five o'clock on a Christmas Eve.
Carpenter's pencil next, the spoke-shave,
Fretsaw, auger, rasp and awl,
A rub with a rag of linseed oil.

A mile away it was taking shape,
The hulk of a toy battleship,
As waterbuckets iced and frost
Hardened the quiet on roof and post.

Where is he now?
There were fifteen years between us two
That night I strained to hear the bells
Of a sleigh of the mind and heard him pedal

Into our lane, get off at the gable,
Steady his Raleigh bicycle
Against the whitewash, stand to make sure
The house was quiet, knock at the door

And hand his parcel to a peering woman:
`I suppose you thought I was never coming.'
Eric, tonight I saw it all
Like shadows on your workshop wall,

Smelled wood shavings under the bench,
Weighed the cold steel monkey-wrench
In my soft hand, then stood at the road
To watch your wavering tail-light fade

And knew that if we met again
In an Ulster twilight we would begin
And end whatever we might say
In a speech all toys and carpentry,

A doorstep courtesy to shun
Your father's uniform and gun,
But -- now that I have said it out --
Maybe none the worse for that.

---”An Ulster Twilight”, from “Station Island”, by Seamus Heaney.

Comments

[Mary Ellen Sandahl]

Thanks for this - both the poem and the painting. I looked up Frederick Hall - it's a nice choice to go with the words, tho Hall predates Heaney by quite a bit. But that flowing "painterly" style was something he seems to have been evolving by the WWI and early-Twenties period, when there were Troubles aplenty in Ireland. I think it's so great that Joe Biden is a Heaney quoter. Hope it helps him slog thru our own Troubles.