Without wishing to sound overly egocentric, Seamus Heaney's death last Friday came at a particularly poignant moment for me. A month or so ago, some relatives of Paul's were visiting Hastings for a wedding, and I learnt that one of them had grown up on a farm in Co. Derry beside that of the Heaney family, and that she had known the great man and his siblings as a child. "I liked the poems he wrote about his childhood," she said, "but I didn't really understand a lot of the others."
After she returned to N. Ireland, I took down my copy of Opened Ground, Heaney's poems 1966 - 1996, and read it cover to cover, with joy and total admiration. I finished it just before returning to Belfast last Thursday for the funeral of Paul's sister-in-law. The news of Heaney's death came between the two nights of wakes between death and funeral, and contributed to the already keen sense of grief and loss. I felt it particularly not only because I had immersed myself in his poetry over the preceding month, but also because of the awareness I had gained of his personal attitudes and approach to life. These deserve to be as influential on society at large as his poetry has been, and will continue to be, on his fellow poets.
At the end of Opened Ground there is a transcript of Heaney's Nobel Lecture, given in 1995 after he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. In it he recounts the incident when a minibus full of workers being driven home one January evening in 1976 was held up by armed and masked men and the occupants of the van ordered at gunpoint to line up at the side of the road:
Then one of the masked executioners said to them, "Any Catholics among you, step out here." As it happened, this particular group, with one exception, were all Protestants, so the presumption must have been that the masked men were Protestant paramilitaries about to carry out a tit-for-tat sectarian killing of the Catholic as the odd man out, the one who would have been presumed to be in sympathy with the IRA and all its actions. It was a terrible moment for him, caught between dread and witness, but he did make a motion to step forward. Then, the story goes, in that split second of decision, and in the relative cover of the winter evening darkness, he felt the hand of the Protestant worker next to him take his hand and squeeze it in a signal that said no, don't move, we'll not betray you, nobody need know what faith or party you belong to. All in vain, however, for the man stepped out of the line; but instead of finding a gun at his temple, he was pushed away as the gunmen opened fire on those remaining in the line, for these were not Protestant terrorists, but members, presumably, of the Provisional IRA.
It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power... But...the birth of the future we desire is surely in the contraction which that terrified Catholic felt on the roadside when another hand gripped his hand, not in the gunfire that followed, so absolute and so desolate, if also so much a part of the music of what happens.
This quiet, distinguished, erudite genius of a poet spent most of his life trying, through his poetry, to create the future we desire, while acknowledging the music of what happens. If you read the text of the lecture, or listen to it being read by the great man himself (click here for a link) it is impossible not to be both moved and inspired. My only regrets are that it has taken me until this late stage of my life to discover the full scope of his genius, and that he will no longer be producing the beautifully crafted work that will survive long after his own disappearance.
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