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Friday, January 14, 2005

The Plowshare

So last night I'm making the long walk home across the bridge, and I'm thinking about Seamus Heaney's poem, A Kite for Michael and Christopher, wondering why that poem is my favourite of his work. I was going write a post about it today, using for a title the line from it that echoes and echoes in me, but of course Loren Webster has already done that.

Instead of opening ground that Loren had covered (his take on the poem is quite similar to mine, anyway), I went looking for audioblogger and recorded the poem itself (you can listen to it in the entry immediately preceding this one).

I'd like to say a few words about these lines
yet the soul at anchor there,
the string that sags and ascends,
weigh like a furrow assumed into the heavens.
Heaney's inverted everything, turned the world upside-down with the words "weigh" and "furrow," because we have to consider all the meanings of those two words — the combined weight of those meanings forces the two words into a wedge, a plow.




update:
I just realised that, in my rush to explain the audio post, I had forgotten to put the title on this entry. I like titles. So I took care of that.

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