Seamus the famous
By Mahmood Awan
The News September – 15 - 2013
Arguably the greatest poet Ireland produced since Yeats, Seamus Heaney became known for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth
In an old Irish folk tale, a questioner asks Finn McCool: “Tell us Finn, what is the best music in the world?” After a long pause, Finn replies: “The music of what happens”. The man, who composed, analysed and amplified not only the music of what happens but the music of what might happen died on August 30 in Dublin at the age of 74. Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 “for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past”. When asked how it felt having his name in the Irish Nobel pantheon featuring William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw and Samuel Beckett, Heaney responded: “It’s like being a little foothill at the bottom of a mountain range. You hope you just live up to it. It’s extraordinary.” Although he accepted that Nobel Prize is a life-changing event, he was never affected by that status like his close friends and fellow Nobel laureates Josephy Brodsky and Derek Walcott. Replying to a question just after the Nobel announcement, he responded: “This is the way I have lived since I began to write since last thirty years so my writing plans haven’t changed, my circumstances have changed with so many interviews.” He was awarded the Commandeur de L’Ordre des Arts et Lettres (Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters) from the French ministry of culture in 1996. I met him last year at the Dalkey Book festival where he had a poetry reading session. This was one of his last public appearances. It was a full house and he mesmerised the audience with his delivery and his poetry in his so loving native Northern accent. He looked tired and fatigued. Among the attendees was Bono the U2 singer who regarded Heaney as “a great, great poet who changed his life”. The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap He wrote his first poems under the pseudonym of “Incertus” which means uncertain and “uncertain I was” he once said: “It was after reading Ted Hughs and Patrick Cavanagh that I thought that this material of my own from my county Derry is workable.” He moved from North to South in 1972 and that’s where he committed himself to poetry and allowed himself to be called a poet. “To me it’s a very large word ‘Poet’ and to think and allow yourself to be called poet is to consecrate yourself. I think it’s very serious,” he said in an interview. Poetry for Heaney was about time, place and memory. The troubles in the North did influence his poetry which he discussed in detail in his Nobel lecture. His two remarkable poems about his second cousin Colum McCartney who was killed by a group of loyalist paramilitaries in random sectarian assassinations in 1975 sums up the twenty years of killings and the caste system Heaney went through during his stay in the North. Heaney missed the funeral due to a Literary festival which he lamented in his book Station Island’s poem “Station Island, VIII” in the voice of his cousin who then directly accuses him of having aesthetically prettified his death in the earlier elegy (‘The Strand at Lough Beg’; Field Work) You confused evasion and artistic tact. He was unapologetically Irish and despite his love for rural south Derry, boglands and “the north”, he spent much of his life in Dublin. Ironically, as he himself admitted, there is not a single poem inspired by the city of his residence. In 1983, he expressed his strong national identity in a fall-out with poets Andrew Motion and Blake Morrison who included him in The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry. Heaney responded in An Open Letter, a 198-line poem: “Be advised, My passport’s green. No glass of ours was ever raised, To toast the Queen,” and then almost 30 years later, Heaney did in fact raise a glass to toast the Queen during her historic visit to Ireland in 2011. Mahmood Awan is a Punjabi poet who works and lives in Dublin. He can be reached at mahmoodah@gmail.com |