Fosterage
For Michael Mclaverty
Fosterage - meaning Summary
Poetic Apprenticeship
Heaney looks back on Michael McLaverty as a mentor who shaped his early writing. The poem recalls a meeting in Belfast in 1962, when McLaverty urged him to trust his own voice, write plainly, and learn from other writers such as Katherine Mansfield and Gerard Manley Hopkins. It presents literary guidance as a kind of inheritance, where encouragement and discipline are passed on to a younger poet.
Read Complete Analyses‘Description is revelation!’ Royal Avenue, Belfast, 1962, A Saturday afternoon, glad to meet Me, newly cubbed in language, he gripped My elbow. ‘Listen. Go your own way. Do your own work. Remember Katherine Mansfield—I will tell How the laundry basket squeaked ... that note of exile.’ But to hell with overstating it: ‘Don’t have the veins bulging in your Biro.’ And then, ‘Poor Hopkins!’ I have the Journals He gave me, underlined, his buckled self Obeisant to their pain. He discerned The lineaments of patience everywhere And fostered me and sent me out, with words Imposing on my tongue like obols.
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