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The ageless relationship between poetry and farming has always been sentimental and ironic; the two disciplines would seem to have mostly accidental requirements in common: patience, fatalism, renunciation, awe of nature, reverence for the earth.
It is not Seamus Heaney but his American contemporary Fred Chappell who provides my epigraph, but the misgiving Chappell voices, in an essay entitled "The Poet and the Plowman," is one readers of Heaney's poetry are likely to find familiar. Chappell's suspicion that-however much the tradition of rural poetry might emphasize its practical roots-the poet's digging is at best an ornamental cousin of the sustaining work of the plowman echoes an anxiety audible in Heaney's work from "Digging" onward. The practical result of such reservations is that while Heaney has embraced traditional poetic forms ranging from Anglo-Saxon epic to the Petrarchan sonnet and heroic couplet, he has kept up a more or less constant thematic resistance to the pastoral as a genre that discloses the merely literary nature of the rural poem's relationship to agricultural life.
But if this passage from "The Poet and the Plowman" articulates the rural poet's fear that he is laboring for a tangible significance his craft can never quite achieve, it is when Chappell goes on to wonder what we might make of the fact that "our word verse came originally from versus, turning the plow at the end of the furrow," that he offers a way of understanding the détente Heaney seems to have struck with the tradition of pastoral sentimentality in the 2001 volume Electric Light. Chappell is noticing a serendipity in language that is, in a sense, as accidental as the conditions he says poetry shares with farming. At the same time, however, his turn from farming to language, in the etymology linking verse to versus, serves as a reminder that agrarian language is the field on which the facts of rural life and the poetry of the pastoral tradition converge with the enterprise of a contemporary poet like Heaney who maintains a deep interest in rural matters.
Like Chappell, Heaney has noticed the historical connection between the English word for a line of poetry and the Latin word for a plow's turning. The link is just under the surface of...