Castilian Spring: Seamus Heaney

This poem arrived in email from The Kenyon Review this morning.
Enjoy.

Castalian Spring

Seamus Heaney

Thunderface. Not Zeus’s ire, but hers

Refusing entry, and mine mounting from it.

This one thing I had vowed: to drink the waters

Of the Castalian Spring, to arrogate

That much to myself and be the poet

Under the god Apollo’s giddy cliff—

But the inner water sanctum was roped off

When we arrived. Well then, to hell with that,

And to hell with all who’d stop me, thunderface!

So up the steps then, into the sandstone grottoes,

The seeps and dreeps, the shallow pools, the mosses,

Come from beyond, and come far, with this useless

Anger draining away, on terraces

Where I bowed and mouthed in sweetness and defiance.