Seamus Heaney's "Scaffolding"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 4 September 2023

⏱️ 6 minutes

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Summary

Today’s poem is by Seamus Justin Heaney MRIA (13 April 1939 – 30 August 2013), 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 Lowelldescribed 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 Pinskyhas 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.
0:04.4	I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Monday, September 4th, 2020.
0:09.9	Today's poem is by Seamus Haney, and it's called Scaffolding.
0:16.0	I'll read it once, then offer a few comments, and read it one more time.
0:23.6	Scaffolding.
0:26.6	Masons, when they start upon a building, are careful to test out the scaffolding.
0:31.6	Make sure that planks won't slip at busy points, secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints.
0:43.1	And yet all this comes down when the job's done, showing off walls of sure and solid stone.
0:49.0	So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to be old bridges breaking between you and me,
0:55.4	never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall, confident that we have built our wall.
1:08.1	This is a sweet little poem. I have a lot of affection for this short little poem by James Haney. It's one of his earlier poems.
1:12.0	In fact, I've heard Haney himself speak about it with a kind of fond nostalgia, with a smirk, he calls it, very optimistic poem.
1:24.9	I think as if to say, a very youthful, maybe even naively optimistic poem,
1:31.7	though I think it's a kind of optimism or represents a kind of optimism that is worth pursuing
1:38.2	into later life. This is clearly a poem spoken by one young lover to another
1:48.9	about the the frictions that can occur when two people become one person.
2:00.3	I imagine the setting for this poem being early marriage,
2:05.4	perhaps, when two people who have lived apart and been separate have to find a way for their
2:12.0	two lives to be grafted together. And that can provoke some growing pains. But he definitely chooses this
2:22.7	image of something that is awkward, something that is ugly, that is precarious, and ultimately
2:32.6	that collapses.
2:35.3	But that's all by design.
	...

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