summary chapter personal helicon discussion 1
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"Personal Helicon" was written by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney and published in Heaney’s first major collection, Death of a Naturalist, in 1966. Like many of the poems in this collection, "Personal Helicon" draws on Heaney’s experiences growing up in rural Northern Ireland. The poem's speaker (usually understood to be Heaney himself) describes the joy, wonder, and curiosity he felt while exploring old wells and water pumps as a child. "Helicon" refers to a mountain in Greece that, in ancient mythology, was home to two sacred springs deemed the source of poetic inspiration. The poem suggests that the speaker's childhood experiences became the source of his own poetic inspiration—his own "Helicon."
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“Personal Helicon” Summary
When I was a child, adults couldn’t stop me from going to the water wells and old water pumps in the countryside, with their buckets used to draw out water, and the crank and rope used to lower and lift the bucket out of the well. I loved the depth of the wells, which were dark inside, and how at the bottom, the water reflected the sky, so the sky appeared to be trapped or held within it. I loved also the scents of the wells, with their aquatic plants, mold and mushrooms, and humid moss.
There was one well, in a yard where bricks are made, covered by a wooden top that had started to rot. At this well, I relished the full, crashing sound that the bucket made when it dropped to the end of the rope and hit the water. This well went so far down that you couldn’t even see a reflection in the water at the bottom.
There was also a less deep well that had been dug beneath a kind of dry gravel trench. This well was growing plants within it, much in the way that plants would grow within an aquarium. Here, you could pull roots out of the soft soil and broken-down leaves at the bottom of the well; when you did this, you could see your own reflection, looking like a white face suspended in the water.
Other wells would echo if you spoke or called into them, so that your voice came back to you—differently, though, with a kind of strange, purified music to it. One well scared me, because, from the ferns and flowering plants around it, a rat suddenly darted out over the water, making a slapping sound as it ran across my reflection in the water.
Now that I am an adult, to pull out roots or reach into algae and slime, or to look, like a large-eyed mythological Narcissus, into some water source, would be to act in a way considered immature or beneath the dignified ways adults are supposed to act. Instead, I rhyme and write poems to see myself as I once did in the wells, and to make the darkness echo.
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