“And when their objection was reported to him -
That he had gone to bits and was leaving them
Nothing to hold on to, his first and last lines
Neither here nor there -
”Since when,” he asked,
“Are the first and last line of any poem
Where the poem begins and ends?”“
Seamus Heaney, from “The Fragment” in his collection, Electric Light
I love that idea, that each poem is a fragment, that what we read is a piece carved out of some larger poem, which goes on in either direction, into eternity, around us.
