Personal Helicon In this final poem Heaney identifies the wells of his childhood as sources of his later poetic inspiration. Now a fully fledged poet he reflects on his transition from childhood to the here-and-now. As a child Heaney was particularly drawn to wells: they could not keep me away from them with their buckets and windlasses. They appealed to all the senses of an Irish farm-reared child, looking down to see what he could see, smell, touch, imagine: the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells/ Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss. He selects a well where, whilst he [...]