"Undine"

The professor of a poetry writing class that I took said that great poetry should have "geography and furniture. If you fix your poem in a place, and give readers something solid to look to, you can successfully write about even the most abstract subjects." For my money, I think he was right.

The master of "geography and furniture" (in my opinion) is Seamus Heaney, an Irish contemporary poet and winner of the Noble Prize for Literature in 1995. His mastery of language is such that he can write a poem using a skunk as a simile for his wife, and having it turn out to be a love poem (a really sweet one, too).

I offer the following poem, though, as a great example of an "abstract" subject being made quite solid. An undine (UN-deen) is a water-sprite who cannot get soul unless they can get a human man to marry them...

Undine

He slashed the briars, shoveled up grey silt

To give me right of way in my own drains

And I ran quick for him, cleaned out my rust.

He halted, saw me finally disrobed,

Running clear, with apparent unconcern.

Then he walked by me. I rippled and I churned

Where ditches intersected near the river

Until he dug a spade deep in my flank

And took me to him. I swallowed his trench

Gratefully, dispersing myself for love

Down in his roots, climbing his brassy grain ---

But once he know my welcome, I alone

Could give him subtle increase and reflection.

He explored me so completely, each limb

Lost its cold freedom. Human, warmed to him.

There are so many things that could be said about this poem! Heaney takes the myth of the undine (something relatively abstract), and plunks it right down into the description of a farmer clearing out his ditch, offering both geography and furniture. Besides that, the words he uses are everyday -- common; yet, with skillful manipulation of metaphor, Heaney gives us the myth, gives us the personality of the water-sprite living in the ditch, gives us the outcome, and never uses a word that anyone would have to look up to understand! This is an entirely different point, but I LOVE that Heaney will stop one sentence and begin another within a single line of poetry. Few poets do that, and it is difficult to do it well; Heaney does it brilliantly. Each new sentence offers yet another metaphor and kind of moves the plot along, if you will, which is amazing. Seamus Heaney is kind of my poetic hero (in case you weren't getting that), and entirely worth looking into and reading.