Seamus Heaney Quotes

The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world. ~ Seamus Heaney

On the contrary, a trust in the staying power and travel-worthiness of such good should encourage us to credit the possibility of a world where respect for the validity of every tradition
will issue in the creation and maintenance of a salubrious political space. ~ Seamus Heaney

Wyrd oft nered
unfaegne, eorl, ponne his ellen deah.

Often, for undaunted courage,
fate spares the man it has not already marked. ~ Seamus Heaney

The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine. ~ Seamus Heaney

Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it. ~ Seamus Heaney

Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker. ~ Seamus Heaney

Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel. ~ Seamus Heaney

I think the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins - I liked other poems ... but Hopkins was kind of electric for me - he changed the rules with speech, and the whole intensity of the language was there and so on. ~ Seamus Heaney

I've said it before about the Nobel Prize: it's like being struck by a more or less benign avalanche. It was unexpected, unlooked for, and extraordinary. ~ Seamus Heaney

The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also. ~ Seamus Heaney

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. ~ Seamus Heaney

The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It's a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write. ~ Seamus Heaney

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man. ~ Seamus Heaney

Happy the man ... with a natural gift
for practising the right one [art] from the start
poetry, say, or fishing; whose nights are dreamless;
whose deep-sunk panoramas rise and pass
like daylight through the rod's eye or the nib's eye. ~ Seamus Heaney

This morning from a dewy motorway
I saw the new camp for the internees:
A bomb had left a crater of fresh clay
In the roadside, and over in the trees
Machine-gun posts defined a real stockade.
There was that white mist you get on a low ground
And it was deja-vu, some film made
Of Stalag 17, a bad dream with no sound.
Is there a life before death? That's chalked up
In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain,
Coherent miseries, a bite and sup:
we hug our little destiny again.
-Whatever You Say Say Nothing ~ Seamus Heaney

The ability to start out upon your own impulse is
fundamental to the gift of keeping going upon your own
terms ... Getting started, keeping going, getting started
again in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm. ~ Seamus Heaney

Be advised my passport's green.
No glass of ours was ever raised
to toast the Queen. ~ Seamus Heaney

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. ~ Seamus Heaney

So whether he calls it spirit music or not, I don't care. He took it out of wind off mid-Atlantic. ~ Seamus Heaney

Postscript

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
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
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open. ~ Seamus Heaney

Smile As you find a rhythm Working you, slow mile by mile, Into your proper haunt. ~ Seamus Heaney

Archibald MacLeish affirmed that 'A poem should be equal to / not true'. As a defiant statement of poetry's gift for telling truth but telling it slant, this is both cogent and corrective. Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a retuning of the world itself. We want the surprise to be transitive, like the impatient thump which unexpectedly restores the picture to the television set, or the electric shock which sets the fibrillating heart back to its proper rhythm. We want what the woman wanted in the prison queue in Leningrad, standing there blue with cold and whispering for fear, enduring the terror of Stalin's regime and asking the poet Anna Akhmatova if she could describe it all, if her art could be equal to it. ~ Seamus Heaney

Anyone with gumption and a sharp mind will take the measure of two things: what's said and what's done. ~ Seamus Heaney

Meanwhile, the sword
began to wilt into gory icicles,
to slather and thaw. It was a wonderful thing,
the way it all melted as ice melts
when the Father eases the fetters off the frost
and unravels the water-ropes. He who wields power
over time and tide: He is the true Lord. ~ Seamus Heaney

God is a foreman with certain definite views Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure. ~ Seamus Heaney

I think the poetry that came out of Belfast, and especially the Queen's University set, in the 1970s and '80s - you know, Paul Muldoon and Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Ciaran Carson - that was probably the finest body of work since the Gaelic renaissance, up there with the work of Yeats and Synge and Lady Gregory. ~ Adrian McKinty

We were small and thought we knew nothing Worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires In the shiny pouches of raindrops, Each one seeded full with the light Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves So infinitesimally scaled We could stream through the eye of a needle. ~ Seamus Heaney

I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world. ~ Seamus Heaney

In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry. ~ Seamus Heaney

Islanders too
are for sculpting. ~ Seamus Heaney

A landscape fossilized,
It's stone-wall patternings
Repeated before our eyes
In the stone walls of Mayo.
Before I turned to go
He talked about persistence,
A congruence of lives,
How, stubbed and cleared of stones,
His home accrued growth rings
Of iron, flint and bronze
- Belderg ~ Seamus Heaney

Fate goes ever as fate must. ~ Seamus Heaney

A ring-whorled prow rode in the harbour,
ice-clad, outbound, a craft for a prince.
They stretched their beloved lord in his boat,
laid out by the mast, amidships,
the great ring-giver. Far fetched treasures
were piled upon him, and precious gear.
I have never heard before of a ship so well furbished
with battle tackle, bladed weapons
and coats of mail. The massed treasure
was loaded on top of him: it would travel far
on out into the ocean's sway.
They decked his body no less bountifully
with offerings than those first ones did
who cast him away when he was a child
and launched him alone over the waves.
And they set a gold standard up
high above his head and let him drift
to wind and tide, bewailing him
and mourning their loss. No man can tell,
no wise man in hall or weathered veteran
knows for certain who salvaged that load. ~ Seamus Heaney

And a young prince must be prudent like that,
giving freely while his father lives
so that afterwards, in age when fighting starts
steadfast companions will stand by him
and hold the line. ~ Seamus Heaney

Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses. ~ Seamus Heaney

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.

The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
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.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.

Call 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. ~ Seamus Heaney

My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there's the reality: there's no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God. ~ Seamus Heaney

The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman - these are public value-founders. ~ Seamus Heaney

I was six when I first saw kittens drown.
Dan Taggart pitched them, 'the scraggy wee shits',
Into a bucket; a frail metal sound,


Soft paws scraping like mad. But their tiny din
Was soon soused. They were slung on the snout
Of the pump and the water pumped in.


'Sure isn't it better for them now?' Dan said.
Like wet gloves they bobbed and shone till he sluiced
Them out on the dunghill, glossy and dead.


Suddenly frightened, for days I sadly hung
Round the yard, watching the three sogged remains
Turn mealy and crisp as old summer dung


Until I forgot them. But the fear came back
When Dan trapped big rats, snared rabbits, shot crows
Or, with a sickening tug, pulled old hens' necks.


Still, living displaces false sentiments
And now, when shrill pups are prodded to drown,
I just shrug, 'Bloody pups'. It makes sense:


'Prevention of cruelty' talk cuts ice in town
Where they consider death unnatural,
But on well-run farms pests have to be kept down. ~ Seamus Heaney

Write whatever you like! ~ Seamus Heaney

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

Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure
The bastion of sensation. Do not waver
Into language. Do not waver in it. ~ Seamus Heaney

Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again. ~ Seamus Heaney

Since when," he asked,
"Are the first line and last line of any poem
Where the poem begins and ends? ~ Seamus Heaney

I see." Gamache lowered his voice, though all could still hear the words. "When I was Chief Superintendent, I had a framed poster in my office. On it were the last words of a favorite poet, Seamus Heaney. Noli timere. It's Latin. Do you know what it means?"

He looked around the room.

"Neither did I," he admitted when no one spoke. "I had to look it up. It means 'Be Not Afraid.' His eyes returned to the unhappy young agent. "In this job you'll have to do things that scare you. You might be afraid, but you must be brave. When I ask you to do something, you must trust there's a good reason. And I need to trust that you will do it. D'accord? ~ Louise Penny

The dotted line my father's ashplant made On Sandymount Strand Is something else the tide won't wash away. ~ Seamus Heaney

Desmond O'Grady is one of the senior figures in Irish
Literary life, exemplary in the way he has committed
himself over the decades to the vocation of poetry and
has lived selflessly for the art ~ Seamus Heaney

Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can't be too optimistic. ~ Seamus Heaney

I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center. ~ Seamus Heaney

You carried your own burden and very soon your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared. ~ Seamus Heaney

It is very true to say that work done by writers is quite often an attempt to give solid expression to that which is bothering them ... They feel they have got it right if they express the stress. ~ Seamus Heaney

All I know is a door into the dark ~ Seamus Heaney

How perilous is it to choose not to love the life we're shown? ~ Seamus Heaney

Let whoever can win glory before death. ~ Seamus Heaney

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
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

"Postscript ~ Seamus Heaney

The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don't have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them. ~ Seamus Heaney

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. ~ Seamus Heaney

Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for. ~ Seamus Heaney

The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go. ~ Seamus Heaney

You lose more of yourself than you redeem
doing the decent thing. Keep at a tangent
When they make the circle wide, it's time to swim
Out on your own and fill the element
with signatures on your own frequency. ~ Seamus Heaney

I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment. ~ Seamus Heaney

But every now and then, just weighing in is what it must come down to, and without any self-exculpation or self-pity. ~ Seamus Heaney

Then I thought of the tribe whose dances never fail / For they keep dancing till they sight the deer. ~ Seamus Heaney

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells. ~ Seamus Heaney

The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul. ~ Seamus Heaney

What do we say any more to conjure the salt of our earth? So much comes and is gone that should be crystal and kept, and amicable weathers that bring up the grain of things, their tang of season and store, are all the packing we'll get. ~ Seamus Heaney

My passport's green. ~ Seamus Heaney

The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost. ~ Seamus Heaney

Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland - it operates not as a class system, but a caste system. ~ Seamus Heaney

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full,
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not. ~ Seamus Heaney

I feel myself part of something. Not only being part of a community but part of an actual moment and a movement of Irish writing and art. That sense of being part of the whole thing is the deepest joy. ~ Seamus Heaney

Poetry is language in orbit. ~ Seamus Heaney

It is said that once upon a time St. Kevin was kneeling with his arms stretched out in the form of a cross in Glendalough ... As Kevin knelt and prayed, a blackbird mistook his outstretched hand for some kind of roost and swooped down upon it, laid a clutch of eggs in it and proceeded to nest in it as if it were the branch of a tree. Then, overcome with pity and constrained by his faith to love all creatures great and small, Kevin stayed immobile for hours and days and nights and weeks, holding out his hand until the eggs hatched and the fledging grew wings, true to life if subversive of common sense, at the intersection of natural process and the glimpsed ideal, at one and the same time a signpost and a reminder. Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew. ~ Seamus Heaney

I might enjoy being an albatross, being able to glide for days and daydream for hundreds of miles along the thermals. And then being able to hang like an affliction round some people's necks. ~ Seamus Heaney

My point is there's a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It's a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally. ~ Seamus Heaney

Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep. ~ Seamus Heaney

Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself. ~ Seamus Heaney

One of the best descriptions of the type of writer I am was given by Tom Paulin, who described himself as a 'binge' writer - like a binge drinker. I go on binges. ~ Seamus Heaney

I step through origins
like a dog turning
its memories of wilderness
on the kitchen mat:
the bog floor shakes,
water cheeps and lisps
as I walk down
rushes and heather.
I love this turf-face,
it's black incisions,
the cooped secrets
of process and ritual:
-Kinship ~ Seamus Heaney

My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children. ~ Seamus Heaney

A four foot box, a foot for every year. ~ Seamus Heaney

We talked about desire and being jealous,
Our conversation a loose single gown
Or a white picnic tablecloth spread out
Like a book of manners in the wilderness. ~ Seamus Heaney

I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward. ~ Seamus Heaney

Sonnet is about movement in a form. ~ Seamus Heaney

And did I seek the Kingdom? Will the Kingdom
Come? The idea of it there,
Behind its scrim since font and fontanel,

Breaks like light or water,
Like giddiness I felt at the old story
Of how he'd turn away from the motif,

Spread his legs, bend low, then look between them
For the mystery of the hard and fast
To be unveiled, his inverted face contorting.

Like an arse-kisser's in some vision of the damned
Until he'd straighten, turn back, cock an eye
And stand with the brush at arm's length, readying. ~ Seamus Heaney

My body was braille for the creeping influences. ~ Seamus Heaney

My father was a creature of the archaic world, really. He would have been entirely at home in a Gaelic hill-fort. His side of the family, and the houses I associate with his side of the family, belonged to a traditional rural Ireland. ~ Seamus Heaney

You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport. ~ Seamus Heaney

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. ~ Seamus Heaney

I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching. ~ Seamus Heaney

And you, Tacitus,
observe how I make my grove
on an old crannog
piled by the fearful dead:

a desolate peace.
Our mother ground
in sour with the blood
of her faithful,

they lie gargling
in her sacred heart
as the legions stare
from the ramparts.

Come back to this
'island of the ocean'
where nothing will suffice.
Read the inhumed faces

of casualty and victim;
report us fairly,
how we slaughter
for the common good

and shave the heads
of the notorious,
how the goddess swallows
our love and terror.
- Kinship ~ Seamus Heaney

In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart. ~ Seamus Heaney

I believe we are put here to improve civilisation. ~ Seamus Heaney

Bebeorh þé ðone bealo-níð, Béowulf léofa,
secg betsta, ond þé þaet sélre gecéos,
éce rǽdas; ofer-hýda ne gým,
mǽre cempa! Nú is þines maegnes blǽd
áne hwíle; eft sóna bið
þaet þec ádl oððe ecg eafoþes getwǽfeð,
oððe fýres feng oððe flódes wylm
oððe gripe méces oððe gáres fliht
oððe atol yldo, oððe éagena bearhtm
forsiteð ond forsworceð; semninga bið,
þaet ðec, dryht-guma, déað oferswýðeð.

O flower of warriors, beware of that trap.
Choose, dear Béowulf, the better part,
eternal rewards. Do not give way to pride.
For a brief while your strength is in bloom
but it fades quickly; and soon there will follow
illness or the sword to lay you low,
or a sudden fire or a surge of water
or jabbing blade or javelin from the air
or repellent age. Your piercing eye
will dim and darken; and death will arrive,
dear warrior, to sweep you away. ~ Seamus Heaney

You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one. ~ Seamus Heaney

Nobody,
Nobody can be sure they're always right.
The ones who are fullest of themselves that way
Are the emptiest vessels. ~ Seamus Heaney

The next move is always the test. ~ Seamus Heaney

You yourself don't have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality. ~ Seamus Heaney

I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself. ~ Seamus Heaney

Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead. ~ Seamus Heaney