Fosterling

                                                     ‘That heavy greenness fostered by water’ The epigraph is taken  from John Montague’s The Water Carrier in which the poet as a child fetched water for domestic use from two outdoor sources  and recounts the emotions he still feels. Heaney’s Fosterling is here to sing the praises of that same landscape. The poet returns to the lost domain of childhood as a fosterling: before he reached twenty he had left his farming background behind and moved to Queen’s University Belfast as an undergraduate. Taken over by an entirely different lifestyle he would never permanently […]