Seamus Heaney

I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

Seamus Justin Heaney (born 13 April 1939) is a Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet, born and reared in Northern Ireland (in County Derry), and now living in Dublin. His books are said to account for two-thirds of the sales of living poets in Britain.

Sourced

My passport's green.
No glass of ours was ever raised
To toast The Queen.

Once in a lifetime
The longed for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

• I rhyme
  To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
  • "Personal Helicon", line 19, from Eleven Poems (1965).

• The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
  Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
  Through living roots awaken in my head.
  But I've no spade to follow men like them.
  Between my finger and my thumb
  The squat pen rests.
  I'll dig with it.
  • "Digging", line 25, from Death of a Naturalist (1966).

• God is a foreman with certain definite views
  Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure.
  • "Docker", line 10, from Death of a Naturalist.

• 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.
  • "Whatever You Say, Say Nothing", line 57, from North (1975).

• Don't be surprised if I demur, for, be advised
  My passport's green.
  No glass of ours was ever raised
  To toast The Queen.
  • An Open Letter (1983), p. 9.
  • Objecting to his inclusion in The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry.

• 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 or endured.
  • "Doubletake" from The Cure at Troy (1990) - The Cure at Troy excerpts

• 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 further shore
  is reachable from here.
  Believe in miracles
  and cures and healing wells.
  • "Doubletake", from The Cure at Troy (1990)

• Call the miracle self-healing:
  The utter self-revealing
  double-take of feeling.
  If there's fire on the mountain
  Or lightning 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.

  • "Doubletake", from The Cure at Troy (1990)

Quotes about Heaney

• För ett författarskap av lyrisk skönhet och etiskt djup, som lyfter fram vardagens mirakler och det levande förflutna.
  • For works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.
  • Heaney's 1995 Nobel diploma. [1] [2]