Poem of the Week: “Ash Keys” by Michael Longley

The title of Michael Longley’s New Selected Poems comes from his poem “Ash Keys,” originally published in his fourth collection, The Echo Gate (1979). As Longley explains in a feature in The Irish Times, his wife, the critic Edna Longley, suggested using the poem title for the collection “because she likes that poem, and she thinks of [ash keys] as a symbol of poems floating out on the wind and their air to find their readers.” The ash tree is rich with symbolism—it’s the Norse tree of life, Yggdrasil, and the tree often associated with poets in Ireland. (See also Seamus Heaney’s poem “The Ash Plant,” published in his 1991 collection Seeing Things, for its connection to Virgil’s Aeneid). In Michael Longley’s poem, ash keys seem to unlock a psychological space parallel to the natural world, “a field / That touches the horizon,” offering a fascinating image of the poet’s mind composing: “In the middle of the field / I stand talking to myself, // While the ash keys scatter.”

Ash Keys

Ghosts of hedgers and ditchers,
The ash trees rattling keys
Above tangles of hawthorn
And bramble, alder and gorse,

Would keep me from pacing
Commonage, long perspectives
And conversations, a field
That touches the horizon.

I am herding cattle there
As a boy, as the old man
Following in his footsteps
Who begins the task again,

As though there’d never been
In some interim or hollow
Wives and children, milk
And buttermilk, market days.

Far from the perimeter
Of watercress and berries,
In the middle of the field
I stand talking to myself,

While the ash keys scatter
And the gates creak open
And the barbed wire rusts
To hay-ropes strung with thorns.

— Michael Longley, from Ash Keys: New Selected Poems (2024)