Seamus Heaney - Alphabets lyrics

I A shadow his father makes with joined hands And thumbs and fingers nibbles on the wall Like a rabbit's head. He understands He will understand more when he goes to school. There he draws smoke with chalk the whole first week, Then draws the forked stick that they call a Y. This is writing. A swan's neck and swan's back Make the 2 he can see now as well as say. Two rafters and a cross-tie on the slate Are the letter some call ah, some call ay. There are charts, there are headlines, there is a right Way to hold the pen and a wrong way. First it is ‘copying out', and then ‘English', Marked correct with a little leaning hoe. Smells of inkwells rise in the cla**room hush. A globe in the window tilts like a coloured O. II Declensions sang on air like a hosanna As, column after stratified column, Book One of Elementa Latina, Marbled and minatory, rose up in him. For he was fostered next in a stricter school Named for the patron saint of the oak wood Where cla**es switched to the pealing of a bell And he left the Latin forum for the shade Of new calligraphy that felt like home. The letters of this alphabet were trees. The capitals were orchards in full bloom, The lines of script like briars coiled in ditches. Here in her snooded garment and bare feet, All ringleted in a**onance and woodnotes, The poet's dream stole over him like sunlight And pa**ed into the tenebrous thickets. He learns this other writing. He is the scribe Who drove a team of quills on his white field. Round his cell door the blackbirds dart and dab. Then self-denial, fasting, the pure cold. By rules that hardened the farther they reached north He bends to his desk and begins again. Christ's sickle has been in the undergrowth. The script grows bare and Merovingian. III The globe has spun. He stands in a wooden O. He alludes to Shakespeare. He alludes to Graves. Time has bulldozed the school and school window. Balers drop bales like printouts where stooked sheaves Made lambdas on the stubble once at harvest And the delta face of each potato pit Was patted straight and moulded against frost. All gone, with the omega that kept Watch above each door, the good-luck horseshoe. Yet shape-note language, absolute on air As Constantine's sky-lettered IN HOC SIGNO Can still command him; or the necromancer Who would hang from the domed ceiling of his house A figure of the world with colours in it So that the figure of the universe And ‘not just single things' would meet his sight When he walked abroad. As from his small window The astronaut sees all that he has sprung from, The risen, aqueous, singular, lucent O Like a magnified and buoyant ovum - Or like my own wide pre-reflective stare All agog at the plasterer on his ladder Skimming our gable and writing our name there With his trowel point, letter by strange letter.