Summary
When he was a child, the speaker reports, he disobeyed people who told him not to explore wells, with their various buckets and pulleys. He enjoyed them too much, because of their darkness, their depth, their reflection of the sky, and the smell of the plants and fungi growing in them. He remembers a particular favorite example: a well which had begun to decay, so that its bucket fell all the way to its faraway bottom. It was too deep to see a reflection, but the speaker remembers the excitement of hearing the bucket crash to the bottom.
Analysis
The poem's title references a mythological source of inspiration for poetry, suggesting early on that the speaker was inspired by wells. At the same time, it carries an echo of the expression "personal hell," suggesting a situation or place so distressing that it seems custom-made to harm a given individual. Seamus Heaney is fond of wordplay and double entendre, and this is no exception. At first, the link between hell and wells seems clear enough: wells are dark, strange, dangerous, and most overtly, underground. But that reference to hellishness begins to seem lighthearted and ironic as we continue, with the "personal" outweighing the "hell": the wells seem frightening to others but are a private source of joy for the speaker. And, of course, the wells are in fact not hells but "Helicons," suggesting that what seems unpleasant to others is inspiring to the speaker.
These early stanzas generally revolve around that tension between wells as hellish, frightening places and wells as sources of joy and excitement. Our first glimpse of this tension, following the title, comes with the speaker's memory that "they could not keep me from wells." It becomes clear that he is drawn to wells despite, or maybe even because, others see them as dangerous and unsuitable. However, the vague "they" with which he identifies these others, and the mildly hackneyed language of the phrase "could not keep me from," stands out. It implies that the speaker feels a certain distance from the "they": the draw of the wells is such that he cannot or does not care to see these interlopers clearly. The vagueness with which he views the "they" is juxtaposed with the vivid liveliness with which he sees the wells. The wells are described with intense, wide-ranging sensory language: visual ("dark drop"), olfactory ("the smells/of waterweed"), and auditory ("the rich crash"). Not only do these wells include a variety of sensory images, but they comprise, for the speaker, a complete landscape unto themselves. They not only include flora—waterweeds and fungus—but also an entire "trapped sky" in their reflections on their surface. In other words, the speaker appears to like wells because they are replicas of the world as a whole, albeit slightly strange, highly private ones.
Seamus Heaney's style is chock-full of alliteration, assonance, and other musical sound devices. By examining some of these, we can understand how he creates an atmosphere of childlike curiosity and intrigue. Moreover, these sound devices create patterns and repetition, which will become increasingly thematically important throughout the poem. The poem's first lines, in which the speaker dismissively references the people who tried to keep him from wells, contain little assonance or alliteration and instead mimic mundane conversational language. This changes in line two, where the assonant U sounds in "pumps" and "buckets" create an incantatory mood: we see the speaker, long after his childhood, falling back under the spell of wells. The next line is full of staccato sounds, especially D's and T's, while describing some of the alluringly mysterious aspects of wells—their darkness, depth, and thrilling capacity to trap. But by the end of the first stanza, as the speaker describes the plant life adorning the wells, softer W and F sounds have taken over, highlighting their quiet privacy and mystery.
The first three lines of stanza two, meanwhile, use a good deal of assonant short O sounds, alliterative B sounds, and scattered P sounds: these are quick, abrupt sounds that imitate the exciting action of the falling bucket. The onomatopoeia of the word "crash" also contributes to the feeling of action and suspense. But in the stanza's last line, "so deep you saw no reflection in it," these abrupt sounds and onomatopoeia nearly disappear. Once again, they are replaced with the soft, whispery sounds of W's, F's, S's, and L's, so that we return to thinking about wells as near-magical and inexplicable places. In sum, through these sound devices, Heaney presents two aspects of wells that the speaker finds fascinating: their unforgiving and dramatic physicality on the one hand, and their indescribable mystique on the other.
