How perfectly acknowledged is this encounter. Every sense is awake to the moment and this moment endures ‘beyond’. Impossible to read without thinking of Seamus Heaney’s death 10 days later or without feeling beyond doubt that Heaney’s soul incomparable and now transcendentally elsewhere. ‘Where soul could mind itself or stray beyond.’
Banks of a Canal
by Seamus Heaney
Gustave Caillebotte, c.1872Say ‘canal’ and there’s that final vowel
Towing silence with it, slowing time
To a walking pace, a path, a whitewashed gleam
Of dwellings at the skyline. World stands still.
The stunted concrete mocks the classical.
Water says, ‘My place here is in dream,
In quiet good standing. Like a sleeping stream,
Come rain or sullen shine I’m peaceable.’
Stretched to the horizon, placid ploughland,
The sky not truly bright or overcast:
I know that clay, the damp and dirt of it,
The coolth along the bank, the grassy zest
Of verges, the path not narrow but still straight
Where soul could mind itself or stray beyond.