Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Autumn is coming. Noli timere.
Been wandering around à la Hugh...
Meteorological Autumn started two weeks ago, Astronomical Autumn is a week away. The leaves are falling in Finsbury Park
But it doesn't feel that way at the pond
Meanwhile up by Turnpike Lane a Seamus Heaney (I think!) has appeared.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by John McMullan on
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Apparently the early leaf fall is by stressed trees. The ones by the pond are not stressed I would guess as they have a source of water not reliant upon rainfall.
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Permalink Reply by Michael Anderson on
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That first picture is lovely Eugene. I never think of getting right down to ground level when I take photos.
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Permalink Reply by Old-Age-Emporium(OAE) on
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Thanks for those, Eugene. Three years on, this world needs to stumble across Heaney now and again in odd places. Noli timere indeed. It's just over 50 years since I sat at young Heaney's feet for a year at Trench House just beyond Andersonstown. It was the annus mirabilis (1966) when Ireland thought about 1916 and Faber & Faber published his Death of a Naturalist, but Seamus good humouredly insisted on introducing us to Ted Hughes and Larkin, Yeats and Kavanagh - but not to Heaney. He just waved his slim new volume shyly in our direction. His one Autumn poem in this or any of his volumes is less about September's yellow leaves or season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, more about something we country boys from Armagh, Tyrone and South Derry might associate late October with, feeling it in our bones but marvelling to see it in poetry:
At a Potato Digging
A mechanical digger wrecks the drill,
Spins up a dark shower of roots and mould.
Labourers swarm in behind, stoop to fill
Wicker creels. Fingers go dead in the cold.
Like crows attacking crow-black fields, they stretch
A higgledy line from hedge to headland;
Some pairs keep breaking ragged ranks to fetch
A full creel to the pit and straighten, stand
Tall for a moment but soon stumble back
To fish a new load from the crumbled surf .
Heads bow, trunks bend, hands fumble towards the black
Mother. Processional stooping through the turf
Recurs mindlessly as autumn. Centuries
Of fear and homage to the famine god
Toughen the muscles behind their humbled knees,
Make a seasonal altar of the sod.
There are three further sections, but this seems to me to capture the younger Heaney: quatrains fully rhymed; a country picture that John Clare would recognise; lots of Heaney words like stumble, crumbled, fumble, humbled; loads of alliteration that three decades later better suited his Beowulf translation; and the processional ritual imagery of the fourth quatrain marking the 'Catholic imagination' that stayed with him, almost in spite of himself, up till August 2013 and his last, shortest love text to Marie: "Noli timere."
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Permalink Reply by Liz on
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Lovely. This summer I paid the obligatory visit to the Van Gogh museum when we went to Amsterdam. All those blues and greens are nice but I've always secretly preferred his potato pickers pictures with their dark browns and greys and the tired over worked bodies. The poem reminded me of those peasants toiling under Vincent's artful eye.
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Permalink Reply by EMC2 on
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Fair play to you, and what a first book. My sister read Scaffolding, from Death of a Naturalist , at my recent wedding. Here's the man himself: https://youtu.be/fNYBwF7lKLA
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