Quotes: Seamus Heaney

 

Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney is one of my favorite Irish poets. He won the Nobel prize in 1995, "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past."

Here are two of his famous quotes.

"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. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here."

"Strange is the huge nothing that we fear!" 

"Cure of Troy" by Seamus Heaney

 

"Seamus Heaney" by Burns Library, Boston College
Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Seamus Heaney is an Irish Nobel Laureate poet. He is one of President Biden's favorite Irish poets and one of mine as well. In honour of the inauguration today, here is a poem that President Biden is especially fond of.

THE CURE OF TROY

 

Human beings suffer.
They torture one another.

They get hurt and get hard.

No poem or play or song

Can fully right a wrong

Inflicted and endured.

 

History says, Don’t hope

On the 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 further shore
Is reachable from here. 

Believe in miracles.
And cures and healing wells.

 

Call miracle self-healing,
The utter self revealing

Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain

And lightening and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

 

That means someone is hearing

The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.
It means once in a lifetime 

That justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

 

by Seamus Heaney 

Another Of My Favorite Poets: Seamus Heaney from Ireland

"Bogland"

by Seamus Heaney

We have no prairies 

To slice a big sun at evening-- 

Everywhere the eye concedes to 

Encrouching horizon, 

Is wooed into the cyclops' eye 

Of a tarn. Our unfenced country 

Is bog that keeps crusting 

Between the sights of the sun. 

They've taken the skeleton 

Of the Great Irish Elk 

Out of the peat, set it up 

An astounding crate full of air. 

Butter sunk under 

More than a hundred years 

Was recovered salty and white. 

The ground itself is kind, black butter 

Melting and opening underfoot, 

Missing its last definition 

By millions of years. 

They'll never dig coal here, 

Only the waterlogged trunks 

Of great firs, soft as pulp. 

Our pioneers keep striking 

Inwards and downwards, 

Every layer they strip 

Seems camped on before. 

The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage. 

The wet centre is bottomless.