Casting and Gathering

Back in the summer of 1999 I did a little independent study over in Ireland between my junior and senior year of college called “The Solitary Voice”. It was a class for actors and writers and I was the lone poet. We all had to memorize a text–the actors monologues from plays such as The Mai by Marina Carr and Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane. I chose a poem by Seamus Heaney, “Casting and Gathering” which he dedicated to Ted Hughes.

We did our final performances on the Aran Islands, on the summer solstice, and hearing the news of Heaney’s death today (at an age that is spitting distance from my own father), the rhythms of this poem have come rushing back.

Casting and Gathering

for Ted Hughes

Years and years ago, these sounds took sides:

On the left bank a green silk tapered cast

Went whispering through the air, saying hush

And lush, entirely free, no matter whether

It swished above the hayfield or the river.

On the right bank, like a speeded-up corncrake,

A sharp ratcheting kept on and on

Cutting across the stillness as another

Fisherman gathered line-lengths off his reel.

I am still standing there, awake and dreamy.

I have grown older and can see them both

Moving their arms and rods, working away,

Each one absorbed, proofed by the sounds he’s making.

One sound is saying, ‘You aren’t worth tuppence,

But neither is anybody. So watch Number One!’

The other says, ‘Go with it! Give and swerve.

You are everything you feel beside the river.’

I love hushed air. I trust contrariness.

Years and years go past and I cannot move

For I see that when one man casts, the other gathers

And then vice versa, without changing sides.