… Britain’s Forward Prize for poetry.

This is from Singing School, a Wordsworthian account of his development as a poet.

6. Exposure

It is December in Wicklow:
Alders dripping, birches
Inheriting the last light,
The ash tree cold to look at.

[He somehow manages in these few words, these short lines, to establish a sad, depleted, inexpressive mood – winter, the wick of the candle low in the last light, the ashen ash tree… Even alders hints, in this context, at elders .]

A comet that was lost
Should be visible at sunset,
Those million tons of light
Like a glimmer of haws and rose-hips,

[Deepening the theme here of light – energy, creativity – dimmed. A comet that was lost… The poet hopes to see it this evening, its brilliant tail naturalized here as the way the bright red fruit of the hawthorne and rose-hip would look, bursting forth in the dark.]

And I sometimes see a falling star.
If I could come on meteorite!
Instead I walk through damp leaves,
Husks, the spent flukes of autumn,

[The theme of exhausted creative energy becomes yet clearer. Falling star – this, the poet, himself fading, will sometimes see… He’s trying to discover new resources for his art, new sharp illumination (If I could come on meteorite!), but instead, spent, he walks in a world of spent leaves.]

Imagining a hero
On some muddy compound,
His gift like a clingstone
Whirled for the desperate.

[Embarrassed, he confesses that he pretends he’s a heroic poet, offering the desperate world healing beauty.]

How did I end up like this?
I often think of my friends’
Beautiful prismatic counselling
And the anvil brains of some who hate me

As I sit weighing and weighing
My responsible tristia.
For what? For the ear? For the people?
For what is said behind-backs?

[Depressed, he poses the question directly: How did I lose my gift? Where did the fire of my poetry go? Why, for that matter, did I ever take up the pen? Why do I write again and again on the theme of my sense of exile from Ireland? Do I write merely to please myself with language (For the ear?), or for my fellow Irish (the people?)?]

Rain comes down through the alders,
Its low conducive voices
Mutter about let-downs and erosions
And yet each drop recalls

[The low of Wicklow is revisited in this stanza, with the muttering rain steadily eroding the poet’s flinty spark.]

The diamond absolutes.
I am neither internee nor informer;
An inner émigré, grown long-haired
And thoughtful; a wood-kerne

[Meteorite, diamond: The poet reminds himself of the brilliancy that still resides in the world, that he might still attain. Yet at this late season – December – he feels himself to have softened into a sort of intellectual withdrawal into himself, away from the world that is the source of inspiration.

In the seventeenth century, wood-kernes were Irish warriors who attacked British settlements.]

Escaped from the massacre,
Taking protective colouring
From bole and bark, feeling
Every wind that blows;

[He has left the scene of history and found protective cover in the natural world.]

Who, blowing up these sparks
For their meagre heat, have missed
The once-in-a-lifetime portent,
The comet’s pulsing rose.

[This longhair has tried to continue making art out of the shrinking, meagre world around him; he has tried to blow (see how Heaney plays throughout on low and blow) the few sparks the wind kicks up around him into the fire of poetry. (This is by the way the dominant image in Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind. Other poets use the image as well.) And meanwhile as he’s vainly huffing and puffing, that comet has flashed overhead, he has missed it, the real show, the real thing, the rare event about which the poet was born to write…

The pulsing rose here returns to the rose-hips in the first stanza — the brilliant natural flare of the world should draw the poet’s eye; he should look up from his depressive world and meet again, as he did in his youth, the hard brilliance of his world, his history.

Yet for me the real pathos of this poem is more general; it marks, as much as Auden’s more famous one does, the anguish of never really getting a grip on the actual, always being at a self-protective remove from it.]