Birdwatcher

Birdwatcher

First published in Everyman, I (1968), Birdwatcher comprises two quatrains which rhyme abab. Interestingly, Heaney uses half-rhyme and para-rhyme in order to perhaps indicate that this is a poem in a minor key – we do not get the richness of full rhymes; instead we get the less fulfilling sounds of – shall we call it – off-rhymes.

The first stanza has a thrilling portrait of an elegiac miracle:

When he died a congregation of owls

Dropped out of the air and the shires about:

The gables, the dormers, the ridge tiles

By the end of the day were feathered and capped.

The second stanza pans out to take in:

Mourners making their way up the drive.

They are ‘screened by eyes, unblinking and foreign.’ We see how ‘the congregation of owls’ keep watch over the deceased birdwatcher. Until:

All night then occasionally one would leave

For its deserted copse or empty barn.

There’s something desolate about the ‘deserted copse’, the ‘empty barn’. They act as synedoches for the deceased birdwatcher, and as such evoke the feeling of mourning this elegy is at pains to convey. It’s a slight poem, but as we’ve seen with earlier poems by Heaney an extremely well-made one.