One of the worst possible inevitable things has happened. We’ve lost a towering talent and one of the great moral centers of the twentieth century.
Because he was a poet loved by almost every human who loved poetry, watching people who may care very little about poetry hear the news and find a remembered snippet is the sweetest of tributes:
A soul ramifying and forever / Silent, beyond silence listened for.
…
The cool that came off the sheets just off the line / Made me think the damp must still be in them
…
Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
…
Trove of the turfcutters’ / Honeycombed workings. / Now his stained face / Reposes at Aarhus.
…
Here is an interview he did with the Paris Review. Here is a lovely piece that our own Daisy Parente wrote about watching Heaney read. I too got to briefly share a room with Heaney, and will never forget it, or him, or his perfect, perfect books.
Of the latter, please buy Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996. And Beowulf.
We don’t have a lot of Seamus Heaneys left to us.
Tags: obituaries, poetry, seamus heaney
Richard Wilbur better be immortal, is what I’m feeling this morning. I’m sick of losing the good ones.
First Elmore Leonard, now Heaney. What a month. I think I’l some Heaney I’ve never read at the library this weekend.
Oh, gosh. This is so sad 🙁 I’m just going to go read the Bog Poems all day.
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.
Oh, no.
I was lucky enough to study him last year; he stayed so engaged, so angry all his life, this illness must have come on suddenly. Beowulf it is, then.
I feel like a little kid learning about death for the first time. No. It’s not fair. What do you mean he’ll never come back? No no no.
I liked this, but I don’t like it, I hate it, and already the world is darker because he isn’t. I loved sharing the earth with him, just knowing that we did.
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
🙁 🙁 🙁 One of the great things about Ireland being so small is that every other person has a story about meeting or seeing him, and they’re all so lovely.
I got to meet him once, briefly, in Dublin. Just an in passing thing, but indeed, the loveliest.
Also I just saw that he died in the clinic where my sister-in-law works.
“It is always better to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning.
For every one of us, living in this world means waiting for our end. Let whoever can win glory before death. When a warrior is gone, that will be his best and only bulwark.”
I cried a little bit when I heard the news. My kitty, Seamus (namesake, obviously) is being more stoic about the whole thing.
I was so surprised to hear the news. I opened Facebook to find a whole host of tributes and I had to ask a friend if it were really true, then. So sad.
Postscript is one of my favorites. “Useless to think you’ll park and capture it / More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there, / A hurry through which known and strange things pass.” Also John Hollander dies on August 17th. A sad month for poetry.
This one hits me so, so hard. It’s not often that a poet’s death makes global news, but that is Heaney.
Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,
Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.
A four foot box, a foot for every year.
The softness of the verses, the gut-punch of that last line; it’s like grief, which goes along not seeming quite real and then doubles you over and leaves you gasping.
Beautifully said.
This one hits me so, so hard. It's not often that a poet's death makes global news, but that is Heaney.
Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,
Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.
A four foot box, a foot for every year.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/b…
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/b…
Beautifully said.
from the Nobel acceptance
“(Yeats’ poetry)…does what the necessary poetry always does, which is to touch the base of our sympathetic nature while taking in at the same time the unsympathetic nature of the world to which that nature is constantly exposed. 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 veritable human being.”