Seamus Heaney(b. 1939)
The Settle Bed
Willed down,3 waited for, in place at last and for good.
Trunk-hasped, cart-heavy, painted an ignorant brown.
And pew-strait, bin-deep, standing four-square as an ark.
If I lie in it, I am cribbed 0 in seasoned deal 0 confined / pine orfirwood
Dry as the unkindled boards of a funeral ship.
My measure has been taken, my ear shuttered up.
Yet I hear an old sombre tide awash in the headboard:
Unpathetic och ochs and och hohs,4 the long bedtime
Sigh-life of Ulster,5 unwilling, unbeaten,
Protestant, Catholic, the Bible, the beads, 0rosary
Late talks at gables by moonlight, boots on the hearth,
The small hours chimed sweetly away so next thing it was
The cock on the ridge-tiles.6
And now this is "an inheritance—
Upright, rudimentary, unshiftably planked
In the long long ago, yet willable forward
Again and again and again, cargoed with
Its own dumb, tongue-and-groove7 worthiness
And un-get-roundable weight. But to conquer that weight,
Imagine a dower8 of settle beds tumbled from heaven
Like some nonsensical vengeance come on the people,
Then learn from that harmless barrage that whatever is given
Can always be reimagined, however four-square,
Plank-thick, hull-stupid and out of its time
It happens to be. You are free as the lookout,
That far-seeing joker posted high over the fog,
W h o declared by the time that he had got himself down
The actual ship had stolen away from beneath him.