Personal Helicon

“Personal Helicon” by Seamus Heaney can be seen as a pretty straight forward poem, but looking into the poem a bit more I found a bit of a deeper meaning. The very first thing I asked myself after reading the poem was what is a Helicon? I found that in Greece it is a mountain, and it is believed to be a source of poetic inspiration and the home of the muses. So, after finding out what a Helicon was, I began to look at the poem and pick out what his muse was; what was his source of inspiration? As a child it began that his muse was a well, and all the buckets, moss, and all the childhood memories that came along with it. There was a name that I didn’t know, and I felt there must have some importance to it because it looked like it was possibly a Greek name. The name was Narcissus, and I found that it was a Greek name, and he was a man in a myth that fell in love with his reflection in a pool and pined away, and he became the flower which bears his name now. This allusion to the myth of Narcissus really brings the whole poem together. “Now I pry into roots, to finger slime, to star, big-eyed Narcissus, into spring is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme to see myself, to set the darkness echoing,” with that first line it becomes a bit more clear that the well was his muse in to poem, and maybe that well represented his childhood and likeNarcissus, he fell in love with that child that he was. The parts, “Now I pry into roots” and “darkness echoing” I believe represents him in adulthood and him looking back through the memories of his childhood that he loved, his muse, and how it is fading… The sadness of his fading memories is represented perfectly by the tone with his use of dark words like “dark drop” and “trapped sky” and “dank moss,”ect. The sad tone also makes me think that maybe he is a little lost in adulthood because he uses dark words a lot, and I look at dark like being lost because nothing is clear in the dark. In the end, the poem was a cool, yet it was sad because of fading memories and him being a little lost in adulthood.