The Garden Seat

 The Garden Seat

Its former green is blue and thin,
And its once firm legs sink in and in;
Soon it will break down unaware,
Soon it will break down unaware.

At night when reddest flowers are black
Those who once sat thereon come back;
Quite a row of them sitting there,
Quite a row of them sitting there.

With them the seat does not break down,
Nor winter freeze them, nor floods drown,
For they are as light as upper air,
They are as light as upper air.

Thomas Hardy

Bu şiir üzerine  Seamus Heaney diyor ki (eşofmanlı Şevket Hoca gibi okunacak :)) :

"Hardy’s poem embodies a way of feeling and thinking about , the past which significantly amplifies our consciousness. It is about the ghost-life that hovers over the furniture of our lives, about the way objects can become temples of the spirit. To an imaginative person, an inherited possession like a garden seat is not just an object, an antique, an item on an inventory; rather it becomes a point of entry into a common emotional ground of memory and belonging. It can transmit the climate of a lost world and keep alive in us a domestic intimacy with realities that might otherwise have vanished. The more we are surrounded by such objects and are attentive to them, the more richly and connectedly we dwell in our own lives. Our place, our house, our furniture are present then not just as neuter backdrops but become influential and nurturing; our imagination breathes their atmosphere as rewardingly as our lungs breathe the oxygen of the air."

Vay anam vay.  Bu şiiri bir yerlerden hatırlıyor gibiyim, ama anlayıp keyfine varmak bugüne kısmetmiş. Buraya da şuradan geldim: I. Kuijt, "The Regeneration of Life..." makalesine Heaney'nin yukarıdaki paragrafının bir kısmını epigraf yapmış. Heaney kimdir, bunu neden yazmış derken çabucak Hardy'ye vardı ipin ucu.

Kaynak:

Kuijt, I.  "The Regeneration of Life: Neolithic Structures of Symbolic Remembering and Forgetting",

Current Anthropology, Vol. 49, No. 2 (April 2008), pp. 171-19.

http://www.historyireland.com/20th-century-contemporary-history/the-sense-of-the-past-by-seamus-heaney/