Elegy For a Stillborn Child

Elegy For a Still-born Child written by Seamus Heaney is a poem about the death of his friend's stillborn child. [ [http://archiver.rootsweb.com/th/read/IRISH-AMERICAN/2003-09/1063085781 RootsWeb: IRISH-AMERICAN-L [Irish-American "Elegy For A Still-Born Child" - Derry's Seamus HEANEY (b. 1939) - Professorships Harvard & Yale ] ]

I

You mother walks light as an empty creel
Unlearning the intimate nudge and pull
Your trussed-up weight of seed-flesh and bone-curd
Had insisted on. That evicted world
Contracts round its history, its scar.
Doomsday struck when your collapsed sphere
Extinguished itself in our atmosphere,
Your mother heavy with the lightness in her.

II

For six months you stayed cartographer
Charting my friend from husband towards father
He guessed a globe behind your steady mound.
Then the pole fell, shooting star, into the ground.

III

On lonely journeys I think of it all,
Birth of death, exhumation for burial,
A wreath of small clothes, a memorial pram,
And parents reaching for a phantom limb.
I drive by remote control on this bare road
Under a drizzling sky, a circling rock.
Past mountain fields, full to the brim with cloud,
White waves riding home on a wintry lough.

It deals with the sad eventful death of the baby and how the mother and father react to the traumatic event as well as Seamus Heaney himself. The poem was published in Heaney's book of poems, "Door Into the Dark".

ee also

*Seamus Heaney - Author and famous Irish poet.
*Death
*Sorrow
*Poetry

References