Quitting Time
The hosed-down chamfered concrete pleases him.
He’ll wait a while before he kills the light
On the cleaned up yard, its pails and farrowing crate,
And the cast-iron pump immobile as a herm
Upstanding elsewhere, in another time.
More and more this last look at the wet
Shine of the place is what means most to him–
And to repeat the phrase “My head is light,”
Because it often is as he reaches back
And switches off, a home-based man at home
In the end with little. Except this same
Night after nightness, redding up the work,
The song of a tubular steel gate in the dark
As he pulls it to and starts his uphill trek.
—Seamus Heaney
from District and Circle (2007)
COMMENTARY
“There is no ‘external’ or ‘immanent’ world unless it is recognized as such by its relation to something that is ‘internal’ or ‘transcendent.’ Such terms as immanent and transcendent, external and internal, this world and the other world, and so forth, do not denote objects or their properties but as the language indices arising from the Metaxy in the event of its becoming luminous for the comprehensive reality, its structure and dynamics.
"The terms are exegetic, not descriptive. They indicate the movements of the soul when, in the Metaxy of consciousness, it explores the experience of divine reality and tries to find the language that will articulate its exegetic movements. Hence, the language and its truth engendered by the event do not refer to an outside object, but are the language and truth of reality as it becomes luminous in man’s consciousness. On another occasion I have concentrated this problem in the statement: The fact of revelation is its content.” What is History? And Other Late Unpublished Writings [Vol 28] 185.