DUBLIN (AP) ― To all lovers of the perfectly weighed word, Seamus Heaney offered hope on this side of the grave.
Heaney, 74, died Friday in a Dublin hospital some 18 years after he won the Nobel Prize in literature and gained global recognition as Ireland’s greatest poet since William Butler Yeats.
He left behind a half-century’s body of work that sought to capture the essence of his experience: the sour smells and barren beauty of Irish landscapes, the haunting loss of loved ones and of memory itself, and the tormented soul of his native Northern Ireland.
As one of the world’s premier classicists, he translated and interpreted ancient works of Athens and Rome for modern eyes and ears. A bear of a man with a signature mop of untamed silvery hair, he gave other writers and fans time, attention, advice ― and left a legacy of one-on-one, life-changing moments encouraged by his self-deprecating, common-man touch.
“He was a wonderful nature poet, a love poet, and a war poet. He certainly addressed the darkness of what we call ‘the troubles,’” said Michael Longley, a Belfast poet and longtime Heaney confidant, who recalled chatting happily with Heaney over whiskey and pints of beer earlier this month at a western Irish literary festival.
“I told him I’d been re-reading his early works from the 1960s, and I just couldn’t believe that as a young man he was capable of writing such miracles. He continued to write miracles throughout his life,” Longley said. “He was a poet of extraordinary complexity and profundity, so it’s surprising and remarkable that he also could be so popular. ... It’s not popular poetry. Seamus made it popular.”
His most quoted lines came from “The Cure at Troy,” a 1991 adaptation of a Greek play by Sophocles set in the Trojan War. His version, rooted in a Northern Ireland that he hoped could reach “the far side of revenge,” sought to draw a line under a conflict that featured Irish Republican Army hunger strikes and the IRA killing of hundreds of police officers.
“A hunger-striker’s father
stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
faints at the funeral home.
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.”
Heaney rarely turned down requests to speak, and kept globe-trotting to university lectures and cultural seminars, despite a 2006 stroke that forced him, temporarily, to slow down. Audiences sought to hear his readings in person, delivered in his melodic baritone. He inspired respect and love.
The eldest of nine children from a farming village, Heaney went to Catholic boarding school in Northern Ireland’s second-largest city, Londonderry, a bitterly divided community that soon became the crucible of “the troubles,” the quaint local euphemism for a four-decade conflict over the British territory that has claimed more than 3,700 lives.
