A poem by Seamus Heaney.
In Memory of Nancy Wynne Jones
Not a tent of blue but a peek of gold
From her coign of vantage in the studio,
A Wicklow cornfield in the gable window.
Long gazing at the hill–but not Cézanne,
More Thomas Hardy working to the end
In his crocheted old heirloom of a shawl.
And now not Hardy but a butterfly,
One of the multitude he imagined airborne
Through Casterbridge, down the summer thoroughfare.
And now not a butterfly but Jonah entering
The whale’s mouth, as the Old English says,
Like a mote through a minster door.
Seamus Heaney is a 1995 Nobel Laureate in Literature and the author of, most recently, Spelling it Out.