THE ASH PLANT
By Seamus Heaney

He’ll never rise again but he is ready.
Entered like a mirror in the morning,
He stares out the big window, wondering,
Not caring if the day is bright or cloudy.

An upstairs outlook on the whole country.
First milk-lorries,first smoke, cattle, trees
In damp opulence above damp hedges-
He has it to himself, he is like a sentry

Forgotten and unable to remember
The whys and wherefores of his lofty station,
Wakening relieved yet in position,
Disencumbered as a breaking comber.

As his head goes light with light, his wasting hand
Gropes desperately and finds the phantom limb
Of an ash plant in his grasp, which steadies him.
Now he has found his touch he can stand his
ground

Or wield a stick like a silver bough and come
Walking again among us: the quoted judge.
‘I could have cut a better man out of the hedge!’
God might have said the same, remembering Adam.

———————————————————————-

A glorious poem by Seamus Heaney concerning another great man: his father.  This is  Heaney watching his father taking on the decrepitude of old age.  Unlike Dylan Thomas, he asks nothing of his father, makes no demands that he fight ‘against the dying of the light’.
Heaney’s father’s faculties are fading and Heaney imagines for him that the old man’s panicked incomprehension of his state is steadied by his grasping of “the phantom limb’, the ‘ash plant’.
In those days, to knock down nettles, hurry cattle with a tap on the rump, break the necks of rabbits, kill fish, knock brambles aside or help you over rough ground, ‘an ask plant was your only man…’  This was a stout walking stick cut carefully from the common European ash tree (fraxinus excelsior)
If the proper care wasn’t taken in it’s fashioning, it would be noted and dismissively “judged’.

‘…I could have cut a better man out of the hedge!’

The term ‘man’ to indicate a wooden stick used as a tool to clean shovels and spades was common in England ’til quite recently.  The splendidly Bolshy writer John Seymour uses it again and again in his writings on managing a small acreage.

In Heaney’s part of the world I think ‘man’ is used more in the sense of the way the word ‘one’ is used, Perhaps ‘I could have cut a better ONE out of the hedge…’ I believe ‘man’  in Ireland is used in a broader sense than in England, and might be made to refer to almost anything.
Most of the poem is comprehensible.
‘…to raise a stick like a silver bough and come walking again amongst us…’ is not immediately clear.  but is followed by ‘…the quoted judge..’
In whose mythology does a man come amongst his people, holding a silver bough aloft, as a judge?

In Irish Mythology the silver bough, with its nine golden apples formed a door to the Other World.
Cormac Mac Art, High King of Ireland, heard the enchanted music as the apples (or bells) sounded and was so seduced by this music that he was persuaded into trading his wife and children to own the bough Years passed and, regretting the bargain he set off to be reunited with his family, He eventually came back ‘…to wield the stick like a silver bough and come walking again amongst us…’

So, Heaney’s father holds the key, the silver bough in his hand, the portal to the Otherworld, as we all will, when the time comes. But in Heaney’s world, the non Christian world, the extraordinary world of Celtic mythology, of love lost and life restored, his father will ‘come walking again among us:’

At the same time, in his father’s faltering mind, he IS walking among us, a stout silver ash plant in his grasp, a marvellous Summer day before him, and whose to hinder him, or to say his reality is any less valid than ours?

IRA MAINE, Poetry Editor