A Daylight Art
On the day he was to take the poison
Socrates told his friends he had been writing:
putting Aesop’s fables into verse.
And this was not because Socrates loved wisdom
and advocated the examined life.
The reason was that he had had a dream.
Caesar, now, or Herod or Constantine
or any number of Shakespearean kings
bursting at the end like dams
where original panoramas lie submerged
which have to rise again before the death scenes—
you can believe in their believing dreams.
But hardly Socrates. Until, that is,
he tells his friends the dream had kept recurring
all his life, repeating one instruction:
Practice the art, which art until that moment
he always took to mean philosophy.
Happy the man, therefore, with a natural gift
for practising the right one from the start—
poetry, say, or fishing; whose nights are dreamless;
whose deep-sunk panoramas rise and pass
like daylight through the rod’s eye or the nib’s eye.
Seamus Heaney
from The Haw Lantern