In A Field - Seamus Heaney

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 the boundary now

Step the fleshy earth and follow

The long healed footprints of one who arrived

From nowhere, unfamiliar and demobbed.

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 the hand to lead me back

Through the same old gate into the yard

Where everyone has suddenly appeared,

All standing waiting.

The Guardian has printed what may well be Seamus Heaney's last written poem - though we could never really know - and it is based on Edward Thomas' well-known poem As The Team's Head Brass, and was commissioned by Carol Ann Duffy for a soon to be published memorial anthology of poems  marking the centenary of the First World War.

For me it simply resonates with what we come to expect of his verse: the puissance of a moment captured, real or imaginary, and this moment steeped in the familiar and earthy metaphors of Heaney's home and life. He is also here, as always, the constant craftsman: the controlling effect of enjambement, and the pacings and further control - perhaps balancings - of the occasional iambic pentameter: The long healed footprints of one who arrived; how the third stanza imitates the act of ploughing a field. He knew what he was doing, always, and he did it so well and so naturally. I love the simplicity but visual exactitude of a line like The furrows once called ‘scores’ still with their gloss.