I couldn't read Seamus Heaney's Beowulf at all (and I'd like to recommend instead the translation by Alan Sullivan and Timothy Murphy), and I've had his Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996 for about four years, but until the last couple of weeks I'd never read more than a random poem or two before putting the book back on the shelf. But I grew determined — the man has a Nobel Prize and Helen Vendler says he's good, though that last may be a contrary indicator — and I've been reading straight through just before turning out the lights.
It's been slow-going. After 10 days I'm only on page 99, and there I may stop. Some of my difficulty is probably due to being I'm tired when I start reading, but the biggest problem is Heaney's vocabulary. The last stanza of the last poem I read ("North") provides a good example. A longship's "swimming tongue" speaks to the poet:
Keep your eye clear
as the bleb of the icicle,
trust the feel of what nubbed treasure
your hands have known.
Now just what does "bleb" mean?
Main Entry: bleb
Pronunciation: bleb
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): -s
Etymology: perhaps alteration of blob
1 : a small circumscribed elevation of the cuticle usually containing serum : a small blister -- compare BULLA
2 : a bubble especially in water or glass; also : a small bit or particle of distinctive material (as of mercury ore in quartzite)
- bleb·by bleb adjective
"bleb." Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged. Merriam-Webster, 2002. http://unabridged.merriam-webster.com (18 Sep. 2004).
The OED doesn't add much but citations, and now I know that a
'bleb' may a bubble in the icicle. But what is particularly clear about that? Bubbles in ice, in fact, distort images because of the differing indices of refraction of ice and air — cloudy ice is blebby ice. So is it a blister, with or without serum, making the surface of the ice lumpy? "Nubbed treasure" would seem to support that reading, but, once again, the result of an uneven surface in ice is distortion of the image. I suppose it's possible the poet is being urged to accept the limitations of vision and knowledge, but I find it hard to reconcile that reading with the rest of the poem.
It's also possible that 'bleb' had a different meaning in the Irish countryside where so much of Heaney's early poetry is set. I enjoy difficult poetry (but not all the time), and I don't mind looking things up when I don't understand them. But, too often with Heaney, looking things up doesn't help. Many times that's because the world about which he's writing no longer exists, and, when it did, it was a marginal world. That's one of the appeals of his poetry, I suppose, a homespun exoticism.
It's occurred to me lately that people of about my age may be the last ones in America who, in any numbers, had much contact with the rural life which dominated the last 10,000 years of human experience. There's an ice-cream chain, Maggie-Moo's, which tells a cartoon story on its store-walls about a heifer (Maggie-Moo) who got the idea to make and sell ice-cream from her milk. There will be some reading this who don't know that a heifer has never been bred and therefore cannot give milk, or even that mammals typically can't give milk without first going through most of a pregnancy. There's no reason anymore for people to know such things. How much of what I know — only thirteen years younger than Heaney — will soon be as opaque as that bleb?
5:44:03 PM 
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