Underground by Seamus Heaney

On the surface, "Underground" is about a memory, but I think it's also about the process of writing poetry. Notice how the speaker returns to examine the scene in the last two stanzas, bare and tense and "all attention." That reads like Heaney the poet (not Heaney the husband) to me.


Underground

There we were in the vaulted tunnel running,
You in your going-away coat speeding ahead
And me, me then like a fleet god gaining
Upon you before you turned to a reed

Or some new white flower japped with crimson
As the coat flapped wild and button after button
Sprang off and fell in a trail
Between the Underground and the Albert Hall.

Honeymooning, moonlighting, late for the Proms,
Our echoes die in that corridor and now
I come as Hansel came on the moonlit stones
Retracing the path back, lifting the buttons

To end up in a draughty lamplit station
After the trains have gone, the wet track
Bared and tensed as I am, all attention
For your step following and damned if I look back.



Seamus Heaney was born into a family of farmers in County Derry, Northern Ireland in 1939. He currently lives in Dublin, but spends a part of each year teaching at Harvard University. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995.