Hello and welcome back to the daily poem here on the Close Rees Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is the final poem here on Seamus Heaney Week. With the new collection of his poems coming out just after the sixth anniversary of his death,

I wanted to share a number of different

poems from throughout different eras of his life. So during the four days this week, Monday,

well, of course, it was a holiday. So during the four days this week, I've been reading four

different poems. On Wednesday, I shared a poem with you called Digging. And it was about his life as a poet and the way he saw himself and thought of himself as a poet.

And today, I'm going to read another poem from later in his career that covers very similar themes.

And it's called Personal Helicon.

It goes like this as a child they could not keep me from wells and old pumps with buckets and windlasses i loved the dark drop the trapped sky the smells of waterweed, fungus, and dank moss.

One in a brickyard with a rotted board top, I savored the rich crash when a bucket plummeted

down at the end of a rope, so deep you saw no reflection in it. A shallow one under a dry stone ditch,

fructified like any aquarium.

When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch,

a white face hovered over the bottom.

Others had echoes, gave back your own call with a clean, new music in it.

And one was scarsome, for there out of ferns and tall foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime, to stare,-eyed narcissists into some spring as beneath all adult dignity.

I rhyme to see myself to set the darkness echoing.

There are a number of layers in this poem that I really enjoy. It's a poem about being a poet, about the calling of being a poet.

And so, Mahini uses the image of, or the memory of looking into Wells as a child and seeing himself looking back up at him, as a mirror into his own psyche as a poet.

So on the one hand, you have that very sort of obvious surface level meaning that looking

into a poem or is akin to to looking into the well and and that he does that instead

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