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b932847
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Sometimes at pagan shrines they vowed offerings to idols, swore oaths that the killer of souls might come to their aid and save the people. That was their way, their heathenish hope; deep in their hearts they remembered hell.
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Seamus Heaney |
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040e320
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Archibald MacLeish affirmed that 'A poem should be equal to / not true'. As a defiant statement of poetry's gift for telling truth but telling it slant, this is both cogent and corrective. Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a retuning of the world itself. We want the surprise to be transitive, ..
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Seamus Heaney |
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b91a7ea
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Is there life before death? That's chalked up In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain, Coherent miseries, a bite and a sup, We hug our little destiny again.
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poetry
life
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Seamus Heaney |
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f950791
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The form of the poem, in other words, is crucial to poetry's power to do the thing which always is and always will be to poetry's credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in so far as they, too, are an earnest of our ver..
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Seamus Heaney |
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b93004e
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You carried your own burden and very soon your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared.
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Seamus Heaney |
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4926055
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To work, her dumb lunge says, is to move a certain mass ...through a certain distance, is to pull your weight and feel exact and equal to it. Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.
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Seamus Heaney |
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8ae974a
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Rain comes down through the alders, Its low conductive voices Mutter about let-downs and erosions And yet each drop recalls The diamond absolutes.
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Seamus Heaney |
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ef0e515
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Late August, given heavy rain and sun For a full week, the blackberries would ripen. At first, just one, a glossy purple clot Among others, red, green, hard as a knot. You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots Where briars scratched and wet grass bleache..
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Seamus Heaney |
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3c945c5
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The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.
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Seamus Heaney |
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81453d1
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Let whoever can win glory before death.
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death
seamus-heaney
mgg
glory
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Seamus Heaney |
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5bf1978
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Happy the man...with a natural gift for practising the right one [art] from the start-- poetry, say, or fishing; whose nights are dreamless; whose deep-sunk panoramas rise and pass like daylight through the rod's eye or the nib's eye.
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Seamus Heaney |
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74d3eee
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peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power.
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Seamus Heaney |
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298a21c
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People so staunch and true, they're fixated, Shining with self-regard like polished stones. And their whole life spent admiring themselves For their own long-suffering. Licking their wounds And flashing them around like decorations. I hate it, I always hated it, and I am A part of it myself.
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self-regard
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Seamus Heaney |
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a60c9f5
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You lose more of yourself than you redeem doing the decent thing. Keep at a tangent When they make the circle wide, it's time to swim Out on your own and fill the element with signatures on your own frequency.
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Seamus Heaney |
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ee6025b
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And here is love like a tinsmith's scoop sunk past its glean in the meal-bin. --"Sunlight"
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love
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Seamus Heaney |
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f828294
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Did you ever hear tell,' said Jimmy Farrell, 'of the skulls they have in the city of Dublin? White skulls and black skulls and yellow skulls, and some with full teeth, and some haven't only but one,' and compounded history in the pan of 'an old Dane, maybe, was drowned in the Flood.' My words lick around cobbled quays, go hunting lightly as pampooties over the skull-capped ground. -Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces
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vikings
ireland
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Seamus Heaney |
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1ac21a1
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And you, Tacitus, observe how I make my grove on an old crannog piled by the fearful dead: a desolate peace. Our mother ground in sour with the blood of her faithful, they lie gargling in her sacred heart as the legions stare from the ramparts. Come back to this 'island of the ocean' where nothing will suffice. Read the inhumed faces of casualty and victim; report us fairly, how we slaughter for the common good and shave the heads of the n..
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the-troubles
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Seamus Heaney |
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a2eca34
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Which would be better, what sticks or what falls through? Or does the choice itself create the value?
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Seamus Heaney |
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4a79886
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I composed habits for those acres so that my last look would be neither gluttonous nor starved. I was ready to go anywhere.
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Seamus Heaney |
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72f0ffc
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Mid-Term Break I sat all morning in the college sick bay Counting bells knelling classes to a close. At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home. In the porch I met my father crying-- He had always taken funerals in his stride-- And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow. The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram When I came in, and I was embarrassed By old men standing up to shake my hand And tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble'...
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grief
loss
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Seamus Heaney |
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b21fe22
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For every one of us, living in this world means waiting for our end.
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Seamus Heaney |
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a59e5c8
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Islanders too are for sculpting.
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wind
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Seamus Heaney |
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287de2e
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The hall towered, gold-shingled and gabled, and the guest slept in it until the black raven with raucous glee announced heaven's joy, and a hurry of brightness overran the shadows.
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Seamus Heaney |
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21c8f0b
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Was music once a proof of God's existence? As long as it admits things beyond measure, That supposition stands.
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Seamus Heaney |
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9b544a9
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A landscape fossilized, It's stone-wall patternings Repeated before our eyes In the stone walls of Mayo. Before I turned to go He talked about persistence, A congruence of lives, How, stubbed and cleared of stones, His home accrued growth rings Of iron, flint and bronze - "Belderg"
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ireland
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Seamus Heaney |
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06b36c2
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My poor scapegoat, I almost love you but would have cast, I know, the stones of silence. I am the artful voyeur of your brain's exposed and darkened combs, your muscles' webbing and all your numbered bones: I who have stood dumb when your betraying sisters, cauled in tar, wept by the railings, who would connive in civilized outrage yet understand the exact and tribal, intimate revenge. -"Punishment"
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i-r-a
northern-ireland
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Seamus Heaney |
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2faba47
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Diodorus Siculus confessed His gradual ease among the likes of this: Murdered, forgotten, nameless, terrible Beheaded girl, outstaring axe And beatification, outstaring What had begun to feel like reverence. -"Strange Fruit"
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northern-ireland
lynching
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Seamus Heaney |
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e09809f
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I step through origins like a dog turning its memories of wilderness on the kitchen mat: the bog floor shakes, water cheeps and lisps as I walk down rushes and heather. I love this turf-face, it's black incisions, the cooped secrets of process and ritual: -"Kinship"
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ireland
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Seamus Heaney |
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1e6ed87
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This morning from a dewy motorway I saw the new camp for the internees: A bomb had left a crater of fresh clay In the roadside, and over in the trees Machine-gun posts defined a real stockade. There was that white mist you get on a low ground And it was deja-vu, some film made Of Stalag 17, a bad dream with no sound. Is there a life before death? That's chalked up In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain, Coherent miseries, a bite and sup: we h..
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the-troubles
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Seamus Heaney |
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77d6c0a
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The diamond absolutes. I am neither internee nor informer; An inner emigre, grown long-haired And thoughtful; a wood-kerne Escaped from the massacre, Taking protective colouring From bole and bark, feeling Every wind that blows; Who, blowing up these sparks For their meagre heat, have missed The once-in-a-lifetime portent, The comet's pulsing tose.
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Seamus Heaney |
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7d8d975
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I was six when I first saw kittens drown. Dan Taggart pitched them, 'the scraggy wee shits', Into a bucket; a frail metal sound, Soft paws scraping like mad. But their tiny din Was soon soused. They were slung on the snout Of the pump and the water pumped in. 'Sure isn't it better for them now?' Dan said. Like wet gloves they bobbed and shone till he sluiced Them out on the dunghill, glossy and dead. Suddenly frightened, for day..
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Seamus Heaney |
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320d4cc
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Strange Fruit Here is the girl's head like an exhumed gourd. Oval-faced, prune-skinned, prune-stones for teeth. They unswaddled the wet fern of her hair And made an exhibition of its coil, Let the air at her leathery beauty. Pash of tallow, perishable treasure: Her broken nose is dark as a turf clod, Her eyeholes blank as pools in the old workings. Diodorus Siculus confessed His gradual ease with the likes of this: Murdered, forgotten, name..
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Seamus Heaney |
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235fca4
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Human beings suffer. They torture one another They get hurt and they get hard. No poem or play or song Can fully right a wrong Inflicted and endured. History says, Don't hope On this side of the grave, But then, once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up And hope and history rhyme. So hope for a great sea-change On the far side of revenge. Believe that a farther shore Is reachable from here. Believe in miracles And ..
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Seamus Heaney |
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64279f6
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But every now and then, just weighing in is what it must come down to, and without any self-exculpation or self-pity.
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Seamus Heaney |
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1806239
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It is a great wonder How Almighty God in his magnificence Favors our race with rank and scope And the gift of wisdom; His sway is wide. Sometimes He allows the mind of a man Of distinguished birth to follow its bent, Grants him fulfillment and felicity on earth And forts to command in his own country. He permits him to lord it in many lands Until the man in his unthinkingness Forgets that it will ever end for him. He indulges his desires; ..
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life-and-death
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Seamus Heaney |
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0cf0edd
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And did I seek the Kingdom? Will the Kingdom Come? The idea of it there, Behind its scrim since font and fontanel, Breaks like light or water, Like giddiness I felt at the old story Of how he'd turn away from the motif, Spread his legs, bend low, then look between them For the mystery of the hard and fast To be unveiled, his inverted face contorting. Like an arse-kisser's in some vision of the damned Until he'd straighten, turn back, coc..
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Seamus Heaney |