Poem

for Marie

Poem for Marie was first published in Northern Review I.2 in 1965 and is the first time Heaney expressly named his wife in the dedication of one of his poems. In four quatrains comprising lines in iambic pentameter rhyming abab cdcd Heaney draws on the imagery of digging and sowing a garden as the equivalent of ‘perfect[ing] for you the child/Who diligently potters in my brain…’. This ‘child’ is rather mysterious: at once real – Michael, the Heaney’s eldest child was born in 1966 after the Heaney’s had married in August 1965 – and abstract, a child of the imagination, like a poem.

In this, the ‘child’ is rather like Ted Hughes’s Thought-Fox, and we can assume that the ‘child/Who diligently potters in my brain’ is the actual garden Heaney will ‘Yearly… sow’. One curious detail: this will be a ‘yard-long garden’, a garden in miniature that would be about the length of the small ‘child’ – the actual child Marie would give birth to in 1966 – and at the same time a kind of bonsai garden, a garden of poems that will be Heaney’s entire corpus of nearly 550 poems altogether.

Note Heaney’s ambition for this garden in the very first words of the poem: ‘Love, I shall perfect for you the child/Who diligently potters in my brain.’ Heaney is vowing to ‘perfect’ his art, to ‘make good’ all of the works – poetical, practical, and paternal – he has set his hand to.

The garden imagery is deployed with what would become distinctly Heaneyesque onomatopoeic pleasures:

… in the sucking clabber I would splash

Delightedly and dam the flowing drain,

But always my bastions of clay and mush

Would burst before the rising autumn rain.

And there’s also something of Yeats’s The Lake Isle of Innisfree in this garden-building:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

But we know that Yeats’s intention to go and build a small cabin is a pose – Yeats never lifted a spade in his life, whereas Heaney would have had the know-how to dig, sow, and build a walled garden from his time helping out on the farm.

And of course the garden as an image has a rich history, dating back to the Garden of Eden, all the way up to Eliot’s rose garden in Burnt Norton, the first of his Four Quartets.

By the end of the poem, Heaney invites Marie into this garden he is building:

Love, you shall perfect for me this child

Whose small imperfect limits would keep breaking:

Within new limits now, arrange the world

Within our world, within our golden ring.

The garden has become, with its protective walls, a metaphor of pregnancy, and also of married love symbolised by that ‘golden ring’.

Poem for Marie is a companion piece to Scaffolding, which we’ll be looking at after the next poem in Poems, Honeymoon Flight.