I WALK each morning through a lovely little patch of woodland known as Sadlers Wood. On its upper ridge is a fine plantation of tall Scots pines whose high green tops would swish and sway alarmingly in the recent gales, and make a great rushing noise like an oncoming sea.

Walking warily in the strange calm beneath them, one could almost imagine one were underwater looking up at the storm above, rather as Ringo imagined himself in the Beatles’ song “Octopus’s Garden”. But, for all the surge and movement of their evergreen crowns, their lovely straight stems and deep roots stayed stable and strong. It is a well-maintained wood, and one sees, in cut trees and neatly piled logs, with the lovely resinous scent of the fresh-cut wood, the careful thinning that has kept the remaining trees healthy and given them the light and space to grow so well.

In this past week, I have come home from the pine- and resin-scented woods to the scent and sight of yet more freshly cut pine, because two skilled workmen are laying down a floor of reclaimed pine boards in our new extension. It is fascinating to watch them at work, cutting and trimming the planks to fit, laying them snugly alongside one another, and fastening them into place.

Seeing the work in progress, and all the hidden craftsmanship and skill that goes into it, suddenly put me in mind of something that I once heard Seamus Heaney say, twenty years ago, when I had the joy of interviewing him about the Wilfred Owen Poetry Award, which he had just won. He was talking about the craftsmanship, metrical brilliance, and sheer beauty of Owen’s poetry. He quoted the opening lines of “Anthem for Doomed Youth”:
 

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
— Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
 

Heaney marvelled at the sheer music of those lines, their intricate patterning of sound and sense, and then he said. “I think the prosodic elements of a line, the assonance and euphony, and rhythm, are like the joists and bedding under a floorboard. You don’t see them; they don’t obtrude, but, because they are there, the board has the response and stability to bear its load. So it is with poetry. I think the greater the weight of grief a line is asked to bear, the more deftly and musically it must be under-sprung; for it is the beauty which helps us bear the grief.”

How right he was, and how true that is of his own poetry, those beautifully crafted pieces that helped his own nation, and all of us, to bear our burdens.

I reflected, too, on how often Heaney’s poetry pays attention to the faithful craft and artistry of the people among whom he lived, with poems to celebrate the skills of the blacksmith and the thatcher, and the skills of digging turf, and digging and peeling potatoes — all these crafts lifted and transfigured by his poetry into something more than themselves.

Even as I return to my desk and take up my pen, I can hear the workmen still laying that floor, and can only hope that the lines of my poetry will be faired as truly and undergirded as firmly as that beautiful pine floor.