Sweetpea

Beauty is fragile but it has a way of surviving the imaginative strategies of an inexperienced young gardener. The piece’s launch mimics the colloquial question asked half a century ago of people whose approach to a task turned out to be short-sighted:’ What did Thought do?(A typical response might have been ‘he followed a muck-cart and thought it was a wedding’ or even ‘he stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni’.) Heaney offers his variation: ‘Stuck/ a feather in the ground and thought/ it would grow a hen.’ Preparation of the sweet-pea patch is sound enough: its regular spacing, rod by rod we pegged the drill; its plant supports: light brittle sticks, twiggy and unlikely; its well […]