POEM OF THE WEEK

For Seamus Heaney, poetry worked best when it was work; not a rarefied art but craft and graft, a feat of making. That idea underpins early poems such as “Digging”, and “The Forge”. We enter another forge to meet the poet’s namesake Séamus in this week’s poem, taken from a superb new edition of Heaney’s collected translations.

“Poet to Blacksmith” comes from the Gaelic of Eoghan “Rua” Ó Súilleabháin, a Jacobite poet, itinerant farmworker and womaniser held to be the wittiest man in 18th-century Munster. It’s been suggested Ó Súilleabháin wrote it in lieu of payment for a spade. Heaney departs from the iambic rhythm of the Gaelic to forge his own music, a lilting, uneven dactylic beat. The “best thing of all” about the spade is “the ring of it”. That’s true of this poem, too. Read it out loud. Tristram Fane Saunders