I make my living as an architect, and one of my favorite buildings is a poem. It was constructed in 1966 by Seamus Heaney, and I make periodic return visits to it, and—as with any great work of architecture—I find something new each time. Like the best buildings, it provides a memorable experience that touches all the senses. When Heaney describes “Under my window, a clean rasping sound/ When the spade sinks into gravelly ground,” I can hear the sound of shovel hitting gravel. And when he writes about new potatoes “Loving their cool hardness in our hands,” my own hand involuntarily contracts as my sense of touch is activated. Likewise, I can smell “the cold smell of potato mould” in my nose, while the onomatopoeia of Heaney’s “the squelch and slap/ Of soggy peat” transports me to a bog. And when he describes his grandfather’s pausing his backbreaking work to drink bottled milk, I taste it too. Through language, he creates a three-dimensional space that I can inhabit, and his observations and memories beckon me to enter.
Heaney constructs his poem like a skilled mason using common brick. As he builds the poem word by word, what becomes so striking is the sheer ordinariness of both its subject and language. Heaney doesn’t resort to inventing words (though who knew a “drill” was a furrow?); when he writes “between my finger and my thumb/ The squat pen rests; snug as a gun,” even a kid can understand it. Through the precise selection and controlled arrangement of words, the common act of digging in an Irish peat bog is made extraordinary, and the mundane becomes transcendent. This use of commonplace language makes the poem’s architecture all the more impressive and sends us the reassuring (yet somewhat intimidating) message: Look, it’s all there, hiding in plain sight.
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