Grotus and Coventina

A poem by Seamus Heaney

Far from home Grotus dedicated an altar to Coventina
Who holds in her right hand a waterweed
And in her left a pitcher spilling out a river.
Anywhere Grotus looked at running water he felt at home
And when he remembered the stone where he cut his name
Some dried-up course beneath his breastbone started
Pouring and darkening - more or less the way
The thought of his stunted altar works on me.

Remember when our electric pump gave out,
Priming it with bucketfuls, our idiotic rage
And hangdog phone-calls to the farm next door
For somebody please to come and fix it?
And when it began to hammer on again,
Jubilation at the tap's full force, the sheer
Given fact of water, how you felt you'd never
Waste one drop but know its worth better always.
Do you think we could run through all that one more time?
I'll be Grotus, you be Coventina.

Heaney commented: "In a museum on the Wall, I saw a couple of images of this lovely little creature, recumbent on her elbow; under the other elbow, she had a pitcher that poured out a steady stream of water; I visited her shrine. This was only a couple of hundred yards from the Wall itself, in the soggy, rushy corner of a field that could have been the corner of a field at home, one of those mucky old sanctuaries down overgrown lanes, far from the road and the house. Back in the museum, I saw what the display card called an 'altar'; dedicated to Coventina by one of the legionaries; a little stunted brickbat of a thing, with the name 'Grotus' cut into it in very crude letters. It was a 'votive object' but it was also like a girl's name cut into a desk or written on a wall."

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