“This was Mr Heaney’s room. The peat’s
From off his boots. It got into the rug
And won’t be Hoovered out. Likewise the sheets
And pillow case.” Solemn, I nod and shrug,

Expecting little better, as I note
The sad brace of dried heads, the shards of flint,
The coprolites and drafts that Heaney wrote
Lying untidied here. “He liked his pint,

Did Mr Heaney, but you know the Irish.
That and a roasted spud. He didn’t pay
The last two weeks and more. You know the Irish.”
And so it is I lie where Heaney lay

And watch the twilight dripping with the murk
Lurking beyond short curtains. Left alone,
I ponder what she’d said: “He’d often work
My bit of bogland like it was his own–

He liked the muck and suck. But then one day
He got some kind of letter from the Swedes,
Got all excited and he went away.
Now the whole plot is given over to weeds.”

Such cause for wonderment: Did Heaney ask
No better than a spade or pen or hoe
To kill his time? Nothing to ease the task–
Girls, say? Or hurling pools? I just don’t know.

*****

R.S. (Sam) Gwynn writes: “It just came out of the similarity between the two names. With Heaney I always think of him out digging in a peat bog, etc.”

*****

The poem plays off Philip Larkin‘s description of himself moving into a boarding house, renting a room formerly lived in by ‘Mr Bleaney‘:

‘This was Mr Bleaney’s room. He stayed
The whole time he was at the Bodies, till
They moved him.’ Flowered curtains, thin and frayed,
Fall to within five inches of the sill,

Whose window shows a strip of building land,
Tussocky, littered. ‘Mr Bleaney took
My bit of garden properly in hand.’
(…)

(But if) at his age having no more to show
Than one hired box should make him pretty sure
He warranted no better, I don’t know.

What happened to Bleaney? He stayed there “till they moved him”. As for Heaney, he got that letter from the Swedes and went off to collect his Nobel Prize. – Editor

*****

R. S. (Sam) Gwynn was born in Leaksville (now Eden), North Carolina, in 1948. After attending Davidson College, he entered the graduate program at the University of Arkansas, where he earned his M. F. A. From 1976, he taught at Lamar University, where he was Poet-in-Residence and University Professor of English. He retired in 2016. His first two collections were chapbooks, Bearing & Distance (1977) and The Narcissiad (1980). These were followed by The Drive-In (1986) and No Word of Farewell: New and Selected Poems 1970-2000. His latest collection is Dogwatch (2014) from Measure Press (which includes this poem). His criticism appeared regularly in the Hudson Review and other publications, and he was editor of the Pocket Anthology Series from Pearson-Longman. He lives in Beaumont, Texas, with his wife, Donna. They have three sons and seven grandchildren.

Photo with thanks to the Bobbie Hanvey Photographic Archive/Boston College.