Seamus Heaney Quotes

It bothers me to have to burden anyone
with all the grief Grendel has caused
and the havoc he has wreaked upon us in Heorot,
our humiliations

They let the ground keep that ancestral treasure,
gold under gravel, gone to earth,
as useless to men now as it ever was.

I rhyme
To see myself

The hall towered,
its gables wide and high and awaiting
a barbarous burning.
[ll. 81-83]

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.

"Beowulf is my name.”"
June 4, 2022 –
52.0% "“hand-to-hand
is how it will be, a life-and-death
fight with the fiend. Whichever one death fells
must deem it a just judgement by God."

The veteran king sat down on the cliff-top.
He wished good luck to the Geats who had shared
his hearth and his gold. He was sad at heart,
unsettled yet ready, sensing his death.
His fate hovered near, unknowable but certain:
it would soon claim his coffered soul,
part life from limb

The hall towered,
its gables wide and high and awaiting
a barbarous burning. That doom abided,
but in time it would come

The whole of the Irish landscape, in John Montague's words, is a manuscript which we have lost the skill to read.

It was like the misery felt by an old man who has lived to see his son's body swing on the gallows. He begins to keen and weep for his boy, watching the raven gloat where he hangs: he can be of no help. The wisdom of age is worthless to him. Morning after morning, he wakes to remember that his child is gone; he has no interest in living on until another heir is born in the hall, now that his first-born has entered death's dominion forever. He gazes sorrowfully at his son's dwelling, the banquet hall bereft of all delight, the windswept hearthstone; the horsemen are sleeping, the warriors under ground; what was is no more. No tunes from the harp, no cheer raised in the yard. Alone with his longing, he lies down on his bed and sings a lament; everything seems too large, the steadings and the fields.

The diamond absolutes.
I am neither internee nor informer;
An inner emigre, grown long-haired
And thoughtful; a wood-kerne

Escaped from the massacre,
Taking protective colouring
From bole and bark, feeling
Every wind that blows;

Who, blowing up these sparks
For their meagre heat, have missed
The once-in-a-lifetime portent,
The comet's pulsing tose.

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.

I don't mean sound as decoration or elaboration, but the actual cadence that moves the thing along.

The writing of certain poems took me to the bottom of myself, something inchoate but troubled. [...] The Troubles, you might say, had muddied the waters, but I felt these poems ["The Guttural Muse" and others] arrived from an older, deeper, cleaner spring.

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.