The Pitchfork
Heaney revealed to DOD (336): I loved handling the fork and the rake, their lightness and rightness in the hand, their perfect suitedness to the jobs they had to do. It meant that the work of turning a swathe, for example, was its own reward; angling the shaft and the tines so that the hay turned over like a woven fabric – that was an intrinsically artistic challenge. Tasty work, as they say. Using the pitchfork was like playing an instrument. So much so that when you clipped and trimmed the head of a ruck, the strike of the fork on the hay made it a kind of tuning fork. The poem is a tribute both to the king of […]