I am struck by the "vision" of "hatched fears" resulting from, what, the childhood admonition to comb his hair, an admonition accompanied by an invocation of monstrous, fatal lice. How could the child not imagine the worst, no matter how well or how often he combed his hair. Words and images, particularly, woven into story have tremendous powers, if only to awaken our imaginations, our own dark envisionings.
The "jellied road" haunts my imagination, certainly.
7. VISION
Unless his hair was fine-combed,
The lice, they said, would gang up
Into a mealy rope
And drag him, small, dirty, doomed,
Down to the water. He was
Cautious then in riverbank
Fields. Thick as a birch trunk,
That cable flexed in the grass
Every time the wind passed. Years
Later in the same fields
He stood at night when eels
Moved through the grass like hatched fears
Towards the water. To stand
In one place as the field flowed
Past, a jellied road,
To watch the eels crossing land
Re-wound his world's live girdle.
Phosphorescent, sinewed slime
Continued at his feet. Time
Confirmed the horrid cable.
--Seamus Heaney
I want to echo what surfers say about prime conditions: Not a drop of water out of place, not a word out of place, not a single syllable gone awry. I take it that he drowned, finally, and probably such an end came from too much caution, too many cautionary tales, than from any simple clumsiness by the bankside.
