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Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.

Seamus Heaney

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Seamus Heaney
Age: 74 †
Born: 1939
Born: April 13
Died: 2013
Died: August 30
Actor
Author
Linguist
Playwright
Poet
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Seamus Justin Heaney
Seamus Heaney
Language
Waver
Every
Bolt
Like
Bolts
Sensation
Sink
Sensations
Impulse
Secure
Bastion

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I shall gain glory or die.
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I've nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.
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A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
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If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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If self is a location, so is love: Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points, Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance, Here and there and now and then, a stance.
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The dotted line my father's ashplant made On Sandymount Strand Is something else the tide won't wash away.
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Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between.
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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.
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Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
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I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
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Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself.
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At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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Anything Can Happen is also, incidentally, a poem that arose from teaching. I'd talked about the Horace Ode (I, 34) [on which the poem is based] in a lecture I gave at Harvard in the fall of 2000 entitled Bright Boltsand remembered it after the Twin Towers attack.
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I am not a playwright. A playwright would take Antigone and hit it a few clouts and knock it out of shape and restructure it. My versioning was strictly verbal.
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Now it’s high watermark and floodtide in the heart and time to go. The sea-nymphs in the spray will be the chorus now. 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.
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Irish readers, British readers, American readers: is it odd that I haven't a clue about how differently they react? Or better say, I cannot find the words to describe my hunch about them.
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