Nobel poet Seamus Heaney bequeaths harvest of joy

Nobel poet Seamus Heaney passes,leaving joy for ever By Subhash Chopra With the passing of Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney not only Ireland lost its greatest poet since W. B. Yeats, English poetry lost one of its greatest practitioners since Yeats, T. S. Eliot and Ted Hughes. More lovingly known by his first name Seamus, he was truly universal voice yet rooted in his native Irish soil. For when in 1981 his work was included in a Penguin anthology of British poetry, he forthrightly made known his concern in verse: “My passport’s green,/ No glass of ours was ever raised/ To toast the Queen.” No offence to the British, he accepted in 1989 the honour of being made Oxford Professor of Poetry for five years and the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2006. Heaney who died last week (on 30 August 2013) was born in April 1939 within a few weeks of Yeats’s death. The long line of poets who influenced him included Wordsworth, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Hardy and Dante. His steady outpour of a dozen collections of poetry from the ‘Death of a Naturalist’ in 1966 to ‘North’ in 1975 and ‘District and Circle’ in 2006 along with other writings over half a century carried the stamp of simplicity, elegance and an earthy affability which made him one of the most widely read contemporary poets in the English speaking world. Laid to rest in rural Bellaghy near where he was born in Northern Ireland’s County Derry, which the British Loyalists call Londonderry, he remained true to his earthy upbringing. In one of his earliest poems Digging , he admires his father’s and grandfather’s work with the spade: “By God the old man could handle a spade,/ Just like his old man.” Though unable to follow his forbears literally, he followed them in his own way: “Between my finger and my thumb/ The squat pen rests,/ I’ll dig with it.” And a long and happy harvest he reaped whose fruits have been enjoyed by many and will continue to be enjoyed by generations to come. Another of his early poems Mid-Term Break recalls the death of his younger brother in a car accident when he himself was a schoolboy: “ He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot, No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear. A four-foot box, a foot for every year.” Having lived his life in Ireland’s turbulent times called the Troubles, some of his compatriots wanted him to declare his colours for the Republican cause against British imperialism. He tackled the question and answer in his own way thus: “ When for fuck’s sake, are you going to write Something for us? If I do write something, Whatever it is, I’ll be writing for myself.” He was part of the protest but not part of the vitriol associated with the struggle. The murder of one of his cousins in a sectarian attack haunted him, yet at the same time he could not abandon belief in the power of art and poetry as the ultimate winner and reconciler. As The Irish Times, English language’s premier paper worldwide, put it in its tribute covering almost the entire front page: “ Like all great poets, Seamus Heaney was an alchemist. He turned our disgrace into grace, our petty hatreds into epic generosity, our dull clichés into questioning eloquence, the leaden metal of brutal inevitability into gold of pure possibility.” The paper, which devoted almost five and a half broadsheet pages to the poet on the morning after his death, also carried a full two-column editorial with the accolade heading: “A servant of the language.” Quite like the Nobel Prize citing which honoured him “for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.” ..................................................................................................................................