Guardian publishes In a Field ahead of its appearance in anthology marking centenary of outbreak of first world war
What may have been Seamus Heaney's final poem, a "heartbreakingly prescient" reflection on the first world war, has been published for the first time by the Guardian.
Heaney was invited by the poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, to contribute to a memorial anthology marking the centenary of the outbreak of the first world war. She asked poets to respond to poetry, letters and diary entries from the time.
Heaney chose Edward Thomas's great poem, As The Team's Head Brass, which he wrote in 1916 shortly before he asked to be posted to the front – a decision that led to his death at Arras the following year.
In response Heaney wrote In a Field (see below), completed in June, two months before his own death and now published for the first time.
Duffy said: "Seamus's poem is typically beautiful, placed and weighted at the centre of the poetic landscape which he made so familiar to us all, and above all, heartbreakingly prescient."
Heaney, who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1995, died in August. He was a towering figure. The poet Don Paterson said his death "seems to have left a breach in the language itself."
Matthew Hollis, who wrote Now All Roads Lead to France, the award-winning account of Thomas's final years, said that of all of his poems Heaney "said that this was perhaps his favourite."
Hollis added: "He admired what he called its 'Homeric plane': the way a local conversation shadowed events on the world's field.
"He savoured what he termed its apparent 'dailiness', its lower key that disguised, in his phrase, 'a big wheel of danger' turning behind it."
Heaney's poem is set in the rural landscape of his childhood. It tells of a returning family member, demobbed from the war, "In buttoned khaki and buffed army boots/Bruising the turned-up acres of our back field/To stumble from the windings magic ring."
Hollis said of reading the poem in the light of Heaney's death in August: "It is hard not to be caught off-guard by its resonance, hard not to be moved by its final, hand-held gathering, or by its sure but gentle raising of the spirit, as Seamus said of Thomas's poem, 'above and beyond the poignant and the ordinary.'"
The 1914 anthology includes poems by Ruth Padel, Jackie Kay, Simon Armitage and Blake Morrison. Heaney's work is the last known by the Irish poet, although the papers he left behind are yet to be fully examined.
Duffy herself has responded to Wilfred Owen's The Send-Off. She says in the book: "For me, the loss of Owen as a poet during the first world war is a continuing poetic bereavement each time I read him. He is a presiding spirit of our poetry."
Duffy's predecessor as poet laureate, Andrew Motion, has written a poem called A Moment of Reflection, inspired by Siegfried Sassoon's statement to his commanding officer explaining his grounds for refusing to serve further in the army.
"His letter or protest is a pivotal document … as well as a powerful and poignant one," says Motion.
In a Field
And there I was in the middle of a field,
The furrows once called "scores' still with their gloss,
The tractor with its hoisted plough just gone
Snarling at an unexpected speed
Out on the road. Last of the jobs,
The windings had been ploughed, furrows turned
Three ply or four round each of the four sides
Of the breathing land, to mark it off
And out. Within that boundary now
Step the fleshy earth and follow
The long healed footprints of one who arrived
From nowhere, unfamiliar and de-mobbed,
In buttoned khaki and buffed army boots,
Bruising the turned-up acres of our back field
To stumble from the windings' magic ring
And take me by a hand to lead me back
Through the same old gate into the yard
Where everyone has suddenly appeared,
All standing waiting.
As the Team's Head Brass, by Edward Thomas
As the team's head-brass flashed out on the turn
The lovers disappeared into the wood.
I sat among the boughs of the fallen elm
That strewed an angle of the fallow, and
Watched the plough narrowing a yellow square
Of charlock. Every time the horses turned
Instead of treading me down, the ploughman leaned
Upon the handles to say or ask a word,
About the weather, next about the war.
Scraping the share he faced towards the wood,
And screwed along the furrow till the brass flashed
Once more.
The blizzard felled the elm whose crest
I sat in, by a woodpecker's round hole,
The ploughman said. 'When will they take it away?'
'When the war's over.' So the talk began –
One minute and an interval of ten,
A minute more and the same interval.
'Have you been out?' 'No.' 'And don't want to, perhaps?'
'If I could only come back again, I should.
I could spare an arm. I shouldn't want to lose
A leg. If I should lose my head, why, so,
I should want nothing more. . . . Have many gone
From here?' 'Yes.' 'Many lost?' 'Yes: a good few.
Only two teams work on the farm this year.
One of my mates is dead. The second day
In France they killed him. It was back in March,
The very night of the blizzard, too. Now if
He had stayed here we should have moved the tree.'
'And I should not have sat here. Everything
Would have been different. For it would have been
Another world.' 'Ay, and a better, though
If we could see all all might seem good.' Then
The lovers came out of the wood again:
The horses started and for the last time
I watched the clods crumble and topple over
After the ploughshare and the stumbling team.
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