Today is just as Burns describes in his poem ‘The Vision’, all ‘mottie’, misty and conducive to looking back and pondering time wasted.  This verse has a tripping rhyme and light footfall, giving it a playful touch, though the despondency it describes was real.

All in this mottie, misty clime,

I backward mus’d on wasted time,

How I had spent my youthfu’ prime,

An’ done nae-thing,

But stringing blethers up in rhyme

For fools to sing. 

I particularly like the last two lines.  Don’t be despondent, whatever the weather, the poem later morphs into hope.    

The full poem can be seen here, where the BBC says it is also available in audio, although I wasn’t able to access anything more than the text version. 

Source: Seamus Heaney, Finders Keepers: Selected prose 1971-2001 (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), p. 361

Photo credit: fabiowanderley at pixabay