My love that is favourite poem checks out just like a love poem at all. In Seamus Heaney’s “Scaffolding,” the late poet that is irish the wedding he shares together with spouse Marie to not ever a flower or even a springtime or birdsong but into the scaffolding that masons erect when starting construction for a building.
Masons, Heaney writes, “Are careful to try out the scaffolding; / Make sure planks won’t slide at busy points, / Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints;” — work that is maybe perhaps not used on the edifice it self but supports the higher work to come. Their care only takes care of “when the job’s done,” when “all this comes down” to show “walls of certain and solid rock.” Such, he suggests, is love: if you place when you look at the time and effort, fan and beloved can “let the scaffolds fall / Confident that people have actually built our wall surface.”
I really like much about that poem — its solidness, its succinctness, its easy, workmanlike quality. The majority of all though, i really like just how utterly unromantic it really is. In five sharp couplets, Heaney reminds us that love — and wedding particularly — isn’t mysticism. It’s perhaps perhaps not guesswork. It will be has nothing in connection with stars aligning. Continue reading