Seamus Heaney, Poet, Rest in Peace

Seamus Heaney

Poet

Seamus Justin Heaney, MRIA was an Irish poet, playwright, translator and lecturer, and the recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. Wikipedia

Born: April 13, 1939, Castledawson, United Kingdom

Died: August 30, 2013, Dublin, Ireland

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It's strange.  As I post this I find myself weeping.  Of late he had a profound influence upon me as a poet.  I respected him.  His 'essay' of 'Admonition' spoke deeply to me and I am grateful for his writings.

      Two fields back, in the house, small ripples shook   

      Silently across our drinking water

     (As they are shaking now across my heart)

     And vanished into where they seemed to start.    ~from Glanmore Sonnets: IV

Born on 13 April, 1939, on a family farm in the rural heart of County Londonderry, he never forgot the world he came from. "I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells / Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss," he recalled in Personal Helicon...The very first poem in his first major collection was called Digging, and it described his father digging potatoes and his grandfather digging turf. It ended...

"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."

Now it's high watermark

And floodtide in the heart

And time to go...

What's left to say?

Suspect too much sweet talk

But never close your mind.

It was a fortunate wind

That blew me here. I leave

Half-ready to believe

That a crippled trust might walk

And the half-true rhyme is love.   ~Obituary: BBC

He recently suffered from ill health.

His 2010 poetry collection The Human Chain was written after he suffered a stroke and the central poem, Miracle, was directly inspired by his illness. Recalling how he had been lifted up and down the stairs to his bedroom, the poet eulogised the biblical characters who carried a paralysed man to Jesus to be healed.

In an interview with the Today programme's James Naughtie in early 2013, Heaney remembered how he felt when he first discovered poetry.

               "It was the voltage of the language, it was entrancing," he said.

"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."...

Mr Heaney is survived by his wife, Maire, and three children Christopher, Michael and Catherine Ann.

A funeral mass for the poet will take place on Monday at the Church of the Sacred Heart in Donnybrook, Dublin.

This will be followed by interment in Bellaghy.   ~BBC Notice