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Casting and Gathering: Toome Road

This poem describes two fishermen casting and gathering their lines on opposite banks of a river. The narrator watches them absorbed in their work, with one fisherman's line whispering through the air quietly while the other's cuts across the stillness sharply. Though casting and gathering in opposite ways, they work together without changing sides, like the cycles of life. The poem contrasts this peaceful scene with the narrator's memory of encountering armored military vehicles one morning, making him question to whom he should report the unwanted intrusion on his rural life.

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Muhammad Sajjad
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664 views2 pages

Casting and Gathering: Toome Road

This poem describes two fishermen casting and gathering their lines on opposite banks of a river. The narrator watches them absorbed in their work, with one fisherman's line whispering through the air quietly while the other's cuts across the stillness sharply. Though casting and gathering in opposite ways, they work together without changing sides, like the cycles of life. The poem contrasts this peaceful scene with the narrator's memory of encountering armored military vehicles one morning, making him question to whom he should report the unwanted intrusion on his rural life.

Uploaded by

Muhammad Sajjad
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Casting and Gathering

Seamus Heaney
for Ted Hughes
Years and years ago, these sounds took sides:

On the left bank a green silk tapered cast


Went whispering through the air, saying hush
And lush, entirely free, no matter whether
It swished above the hayfield or the river.
On the right bank, like a speeded-up corncrake,
A sharp ratcheting kept on and on
Cutting across the stillness as another
Fisherman gathered line-lengths off his reel.

I am still standing there, awake and dreamy.


I have grown older and can see them both
Moving their arms and rods, working away,
Each one absorbed, proofed by the sounds he’s making.

One sound is saying, ‘You aren’t worth tuppence,


But neither is anybody. So watch Number One!’
The other says, ‘Go with it! Give and swerve.
You are everything you feel beside the river.’

I love hushed air. I trust contrariness.


Years and years go past and I cannot move
For I see that when one man casts, the other gathers
And then vice versa, without changing sides.

Toome Road

One morning early I met armoured cars


In convoy, warbling along on powerful tyres,
All camouflaged with broken alder branches,
And headphoned soldiers standing up in turrets.
How long were they approaching down my roads
As if they owned them? The whole country was sleeping.
I had rights-of-way, fields, cattle in my keeping,
Tractors hitched to buckrakes in open sheds,
Siloes, chill gates, wet slates, the greens and reds
Of outhouse roofs. Whom should I run to tell
Among all of those with their backdoors on the latch
For the bringer of bad news, that small-hours visitant
Who, by being expected, might be kept distant?
Sowers of seed, erectors of headstones…
O charioteers, above your dormant guns,
It stands here still, stands vibrant as you pass,
The invisible, untoppled omphalos.

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