Coagulated Sunlight and Gilded Gravel

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. One of the great strengths of poetry is that it can make even a mundane act astonishingly beautiful. And I have a wonderful example of this from a long poem by Irish writer Seamus Heaney. It’s called Churning Day, and it’s a description of churning butter. And Grant, I wanted to share a couple of passages from it.

Oh, yes, please.

Early on in the poem, he writes about how the milk is taken from the cow and then put in pots to ferment. Now, this is an everyday task, but he makes it incredibly sensuous. He writes,

And then later in the poem, he describes the process of churning itself. He writes,

My mother took first turn, set up rhythms that slugged and thumped for hours. Arms ached, hands blistered, cheeks and clothes were spattered with flabby milk, where finely gold flecks began to dance. They poured hot water then, sterilized a birchwood bowl and little corrugated butter spades. Their short stroke quickened. Suddenly a yellow curd was waiting the churned-up white, heavy and rich, coagulated sunlight that they fished dripping in a wide tin strainer, heaped up like gilded gravel in the bowl.

And Grant, that’s just a taste of it.

Goodness.

There’s so much beautiful alliteration in there. Phrases like coagulated sunlight. But also the idea that he’s demonstrating with this act of churning butter that all of the acts of the farm which produce our food are beautiful. Everything that appears on our dinner table, those of us who aren’t on farms, has this labor behind it, right? Everything that puts the bacon on the table and the potatoes on the table is a beautiful act.

Yeah, it’s beautiful and it has dignity.

Yeah, it has dignity. Yeah, but all of it can be described with this kind of beautiful poetry. I also like suddenly. The word suddenly, you know, there’s a curd suddenly appears.

Yes, yes.

Because it seems like an interminable act to churn the butter. But there are sudden things that happen.

Right, right.

And you can feel that rhythm in the poem. I just, you know, I’ve never churned butter myself.

Oh, I have.

Yeah.

What?

We lived on a farm in southeast Missouri. We had a beautiful cow named Daisy and she got into the wild garlic. So for a time, we had garlic-flavored milk and garlic-flavored butter.

Daisy.

Daisy.

I mean, you don’t throw it out. You just use it. But I got to tell you that garlic-flavored butter on cornbread is nothing to be spurned.

It is very good.

Oh, that sounds great.

It was very good. Well, I recommend reading the whole poem. It’s called Churning Day, and it’s by the Irish writer Seamus Heaney.

Seamus Heaney.

We’ll link to that from our website. Martha and I love it when you send us passages from your favorite books and poems. You can send them to us in email, words@waywordradio.org, or make our day by recording it on our voicemail at 877-929-9673. Put your beautiful voice into the phone, toll-free in the United States and Canada. Or you can reach us a dozen other ways, such as Blue Sky, Mastodon, and Threads. You can find those handles on our website at waywordradio.org, where there’s also a contact form and some other ways to reach us.