Seamus Heaney tells us "Don't be afraid"

This morning we read a warm, lengthy and caring portrait of Seamus Heaney, 1995 Nobel Laureate, Irish poet and family man. It was in the US edition of The Guardian, titled Seamus Heaney’s family on life with the great poet: ‘He was always just Dad at home'. If you follow the link and read the piece you'll find the origin of today's title. We find it fitting because it bridges, at least in our mind and heart, the history of Ireland's "troubles" with the troubles we're going through in our country these days.

darkened cobbles in a brook bed

Photo by J. Harrington

As we tried to read the photo of Heaney's handwritten original "Trout," we decided to see if a more legible version was available online. That lead us to a resource, previously undiscovered, Connecting with Seamus Heaney, an exploration of the style, content and composition of many of Heaney's poems. We're at least doubly delighted because of the mention of Heaney's writing about rivers and that the "Connecting" resource "is written so as to be accessible to students whose first language may not be English." That offers a bridge to events happening today throughout our country - protesting the treatment, especially the separation of families, of immigrants seeking asylum from the dangers of living in their countries of origin. It also mirrors, a bit, the unfriendly relations between the English and the Irish over an extended period.

Fortunately, the poems included in "Connecting" include Heaney's Anahorish, which we first encountered in The River's Voice anthology. We'll read the "Connecting" material carefully to better understand what Heaney is saying in that poem, something that eluded us in our first (and second) readings. This experience has definitely been an example of the old saying that "the joy is in the journey, not the destination." If we exchanged Heaney's "place of clear water" to a "place of salt water," we might well be describing our own boyhood.

Anahorish 

Seamus Heaney

My 'place of clear water,'
the first hill in the world
where springs washed into
the shiny grass

and darkened cobbles
in the bed of the lane.
Anahorish, soft gradient
of consonant, vowel-meadow,

after-image of lamps
swung through the yards
on winter evenings.
With pails and barrows

those mound-dwellers
go waist-deep in mist
to break the light ice
at wells and dunghills. 

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