| Bogland | Requires Real Player. |
Seamus Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. This poem was written in the 1960s and concerns the 'bog', one of the few words in the English language to come from Gaelic. This recording features in 'The Living Poet', a Radio 3 programme from 1980.
We have no prairies
Is wooed into the cyclops' eye
They've taken the skeleton
Butter sunk under
Melting and opening underfoot,
Only the waterlogged trunks
Every layer they strip
To slice a big sun at evening -
Everywhere the eye concedes to
Encroaching horizon,
Of a tarn. Our unfenced country
Is bog that keeps crusting
Between the sights of the sun.
Of the Great Irish Elk
Out of the peat, set it up
An astounding crate full of air.
More than a hundred years
Was recovered salty and white.
The ground itself is kind, black butter
Missing its last definition
By millions of years.
They'll never dig coal here,
Of great firs, soft as pulp.
Our pioneers keep striking
Inwards and downwards,
Seems camped on before.
The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.
The wet centre is bottomless.
Reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber on behalf of Seamus Heaney.
