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A Kite for Michael and Christopher
All through that Sunday afternoon
a kite flew above Sunday,
a tightened drumhead, an armful of blown chaff.
I’d seen it grey and slippy in the making,
I’d tapped it when it dried out white and stiff,
I’d tied the bows of newspaper
along its six-foot tail.
But now it was far up like a small black lark
and now it dragged as if the bellied string
were a wet rope hauled upon
to lift a shoal.
My friend says that the human soul
is about the weight of a snipe,
yet the soul at anchor there,
the string that sags and ascends,
weigh like a furrow assumed into the heavens.
Before the kite plunges down into the wood
and this line goes useless
take in your two hands, boys, and feel
the strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief.
You were born fit for it.
Stand in here in front of me
and take the strain.
In a television interview, Seamus Heaney said of this poem
“The dedication to the children was because we both belong to the children... It's a very serious poem, it's a grievous poem in a way. It was risky to write it, in a way, I felt. I dedicated it to them, but it was remembering my own father. The one extraordinary thing that he did for me in childhood was fly a kite. He wasn't inclined to fly kites, he was rarely playing. He had a playful sense of the world, but he was a country man and a farmer, and he didn't tend to go and play with the children on the strand or on the beach or touch a football or anything like that. But the one extraordinary thing I remember was the kite, and the kite is extraordinary in itself. It looked so limber and light up there, but there's a powerful pull. There's a weight and it goes up, but it's hanging. Gravity is in that string. So it's that sensation that I remembered and it then became the long-tailed pull of grief. The poem, where that came from, I don't know, but it's sunt lacrimae rerum, as Virgil says. Our mortality involves weeping and you'd better ready yourself for it ”
The comment in the fourth stanza that the human soul weighs as much as a snipe may be a reference to Fludd (see my scrapbook page 16) since that is probably the only other place where the idea of the human soul having weight is linked to kites; but 40 pounds is far too heavy for a snipe. Poetic licence, I suppose.