Seamus Heaney Quotes
1939–2013 Northern Ireland
Seamus Justin Heaney (13 April 1939 – 30 August 2013) was an Irish poet, playwright, and translator. In 1995 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
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Random Seamus Heaney quote
15 quotes
I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
Believe in miracles
and cures and healing wells.
I don't mean sound as decoration or elaboration, but the actual cadence that moves the thing along.
In one sense the efficacy of poetry is nil – no lyric has ever stopped a tank. In another sense it is unlimited.
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.
God is a foreman with certain definite views
Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure.
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)
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.
My poetry journey into the wilderness of language was a journey where each point of arrival turned out to be a stepping stone rather than a destination.
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these.
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.
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.
I had my existence. I was there.
Me in the place and the place in me.
Our shells clacked on the plates.
My tongue was a filling estuary,
My palate hung with starlight:
As I tasted the salty Pleiades
Orion dipped his foot into the water.
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.