Seamus Heaney's Alphabets; Heaney in Boston

"Alphabets" was Seamus Heaney's Phi Beta Kappa poem at Harvard University in 1984.

On the Harvard connection

"Two of Heaney’s poems...were “gifts” to Harvard. “Alphabets” was composed for the 1984 Phi Beta Kappa Exercises. It’s a child’s-eye view of language, from the first letters in chalk, through the Latin and Gaelic of boyhood, to the sense of wordless wonder that survives adulthood, “As from his small window/The astronaut sees all he has sprung from.”

These are the last three lines:

"All agog at the plasterer on his ladder
Skimming our gable and writing our name there
With his trowel point, letter by strange letter."

Seamus Heaney reads "Alphabets"

See also, on Poetry in Boston

Seamus Heaney's Nobel Prize Lecture, Crediting Poetry

Alphabets can be found here

("As from his small window
The astronaut sees all that he has sprung from,
The risen, aqueous, singular, lucent O
Like a magnified and buoyant ovum -

Or like my own wide pre-reflective stare
All agog at the plasterer on his ladder
Skimming our gable and writing our name there
With his trowel point, letter by strange letter")