Text of the Poem | Personal Helicon By Seamus Heaney | Eureka Study Aids

1. As a child, they could not keep me from wells

2. And old pumps with buckets and windlasses. 

3. I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells

4. Of waterweed, fungus and dans moss. 

5. One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top. 

6. In savoured the rich crash when a bucket

7. Plummeted down at the end of a rope. 

8. So deep you saw no reflection in it. 

9. A shallow one under a dry stone ditch

10. Fructified like any aquarium. 

11. When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch

12. A white face hovered over the bottom. 

13. Others had echoes, gave back your own call

14. With a clean new music int it. And one

15. Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall

16. Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection. 

17. Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime, 

18. To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring

19. Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme

20. To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.