Seamus Heaney's "May"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 22 May 2023

⏱️ 7 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What better way to bring back The Daily Poem than with a poem by one of my favorite poets, Seamus Heaney.

Heaney was an Irish poet, playwright and translator. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature.[1][2] Among his best-known works is Death of a Naturalist (1966), his first major published volume. Heaney was and is still recognised as one of the principal contributors to poetry in Ireland during his lifetime. American poet Robert Lowell described him as "the most important Irish poet since Yeats", and many others, including the academic John Sutherland, have said that he was "the greatest poet of our age".[3][4] Robert Pinsky has stated that "with his wonderful gift of eye and ear Heaney has the gift of the story-teller."[5] Upon his death in 2013, The Independent described him as "probably the best-known poet in the world".[6]

(Bio via Wikipedia)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm David Kern, and today's Monday, May 22nd, 2003.
0:10.3	Today's poem is by, well, one of my favorite poets, Seamus Haney. As we relaunched this podcast, I thought,
0:18.4	what better time than to just turn to one of the stalwarts, one of my favorites,
0:23.2	one of the people that I turn to when I'm in a poetry rut, say, when I'm looking for something
0:28.9	that is just right up my alley that suits my tastes. So Seamus Haney is just about the
0:36.7	prime example of that.
0:38.6	He was an Irish poet, playwright, and translator who lived from 1939 to 2013.
0:45.7	He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in literature and is known for many works of poetry,
0:50.4	including Death of a Naturalist, but also a translation of Beowulf.
0:55.1	The poem that I'm going to read today is called appropriately May.
1:00.1	I will read it once, as is my custom on this podcast.
1:03.4	Then I will offer a couple of comments and then read it one more time.
1:07.2	So here we go.
1:08.9	Seamus Haney's poem, May.
1:14.8	Okay. So here we go. Shamis Haney's poem, May. When I looked down from the bridge,
1:17.4	trout were flipping the sky into smithereens.
1:20.9	The stones of the wall warmed me.
1:24.7	Waiting green stems, lugs of leaf that untangle and bruise,
1:29.4	"'there are tiny gushers of juice, my toecaps sparkle now over the soft fontanelle of Ireland.
1:36.2	"'I should wear hide shoes, the hair next my skin for walking this ground.
1:43.2	"'Wasn't there a spa well?
1:45.6	It's copping grassy pendant.
	...

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