0:00:08 > 0:00:13Seamus Heaney is perhaps the best-known poet writing today.
0:00:13 > 0:00:18Humane and accessible his writing celebrates the love,
0:00:18 > 0:00:24integrity and sheer endurance that he's found in the people of his often troubled native Ireland.
0:00:24 > 0:00:28When he won the Nobel Prize in 1995,
0:00:28 > 0:00:32the judges praised him for his lyrical beauty and ethical depth,
0:00:32 > 0:00:37for poems which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.
0:00:37 > 0:00:43Now, Heaney has written a verse translation of Antigone for Dublin's Abbey Theatre.
0:00:43 > 0:00:46Titled the Burial At Thebes,
0:00:46 > 0:00:51it gives a sharp contemporary twist to Sophocles' classic text,
0:00:51 > 0:00:54with echoes of the Iraq war and Guantanamo Bay.
0:01:02 > 0:01:08- Did you or did you not know the proclamation for battle?- I did know.
0:01:08 > 0:01:11How could I not.
0:01:11 > 0:01:14Didn't everybody?
0:01:14 > 0:01:19The play pits Antigone against her uncle, Creon, King of Thebes,
0:01:19 > 0:01:25whose decree that the body of her brother, Polyneices, be left to rot as befits a traitor.
0:01:25 > 0:01:30When she defies his order, the scene is set for a clash
0:01:30 > 0:01:33between state authority and private conscience.
0:01:33 > 0:01:36You dare to disobey the law.
0:01:36 > 0:01:41I disobeyed because the law was not the law of Zeus.
0:01:41 > 0:01:45Nor the law ordained by the justice among the guards of the dead.
0:01:45 > 0:01:50What they decree is immemorial and binding for us all.
0:01:51 > 0:01:57When you were asked by the abbey to create a version of Antigone,
0:01:57 > 0:02:04how did you bring yourself to it, without kind of subverting or sidelining Sophocles?
0:02:04 > 0:02:10The problem for me is saying, "How do you get the right to write?"
0:02:10 > 0:02:14There has to be some excitement.
0:02:14 > 0:02:16HE COUGHS
0:02:16 > 0:02:22There was in recognising that there was a political moment in the world
0:02:22 > 0:02:27with the Bush administration doing Creon,
0:02:27 > 0:02:31forcing the rest of the world to not bury traitors.
0:02:31 > 0:02:36Guantanamo Bay was about to occur and so on.
0:02:36 > 0:02:42So, there's always enough political anxiety for Antigone.
0:02:42 > 0:02:46- Will it be enough to see me executed?- More than enough.
0:02:46 > 0:02:48Why don't you do it quickly?
0:02:48 > 0:02:52Anything I have to say to you or you to me only deepens the wound.
0:02:52 > 0:02:57I never did a nobler thing than bury my brother, Polyneices.
0:02:57 > 0:03:02If these men weren't so afraid to sound unpatriotic, they'd say it.
0:03:02 > 0:03:04But you are king.
0:03:04 > 0:03:08And because you are king, you won't be contradicted.
0:03:08 > 0:03:13In your version, it's Antigone who reports to her sister
0:03:13 > 0:03:16that Creon has said,
0:03:16 > 0:03:21"Whoever isn't for us, is against us", in this absolutist position.
0:03:21 > 0:03:26- George Bush practically said these words.- I know, yes.
0:03:26 > 0:03:31The pressure from the Bush administration was the reality.
0:03:31 > 0:03:33CHEERS AND APPLAUSE
0:03:33 > 0:03:38And the war on terror, the very words caused anxiety,
0:03:38 > 0:03:42you know, because you can't have war on terror.
0:03:42 > 0:03:49The images of the prisoners in the Guantanamo Bay arrivals,
0:03:49 > 0:03:54people chained in foot irons, walking behind guards with guns,
0:03:54 > 0:03:59it reminded me of, I have to say, a Roman triumph.
0:03:59 > 0:04:04I've seen images in my old school Latin book of the Gauls,
0:04:04 > 0:04:09or whoever being marched down by the legions
0:04:09 > 0:04:14who are technically equipped as the American army is now,
0:04:14 > 0:04:21being shown to the citizenry as a form of vindictive, triumphalist, callous treatment.
0:04:21 > 0:04:26You decided to call your... It's not a translation, is it?
0:04:26 > 0:04:28I mean a translation is too narrow.
0:04:28 > 0:04:31It's your vision of Antigone.
0:04:31 > 0:04:34You called it Burial At Thebes, why?
0:04:34 > 0:04:37If you say the word burial,
0:04:37 > 0:04:42it has a purchase on yourself as a member of the species.
0:04:42 > 0:04:46Secularised as we are and dereligionised as we are,
0:04:46 > 0:04:52the word burial just still has a faintest sense of solemnity.
0:04:52 > 0:04:56And so it reawakens, I hope,
0:04:56 > 0:05:02it stirs up something in the common, unconscious, the burial at Thebes.
0:05:02 > 0:05:04It's also what the play is about.
0:05:04 > 0:05:09Blake Morrison says, "In times of crisis, classics can reach us."
0:05:09 > 0:05:14They reach us at any time but they reach us more at these times.
0:05:14 > 0:05:20Do you think people need to try and make sense of the horror that's going on just now?
0:05:20 > 0:05:26I keep quoting Robert Frost, very simple, over-quoted,
0:05:26 > 0:05:32about a poem as, "a momentary stay against confusion."
0:05:32 > 0:05:39Momentarily, it passes, but there is a satisfaction for the moment of this being clarified.
0:05:39 > 0:05:41Antigone...
0:05:41 > 0:05:46It doesn't solve, it ends in grief on both sides
0:05:46 > 0:05:51but there is a stern, veteran note to the choristers
0:05:51 > 0:05:56that appeals to me from the voice really of elders.
0:05:56 > 0:06:03The country I grew up in was quite close to Iceland and Ancient Greece,
0:06:03 > 0:06:08in that the elder had veteran knowledge, folk wisdom was spoken.
0:06:08 > 0:06:13There is something of that Ulster country,
0:06:13 > 0:06:19standing at the jam of the door, saying, "Listen, son, watch out."
0:06:19 > 0:06:22There's some of that in the choruses.
0:06:22 > 0:06:25Wise conduct is the key to happiness.
0:06:37 > 0:06:41Finding resonance in ancient stories and ancient sites
0:06:41 > 0:06:43is a trademark of Heaney's art.
0:06:43 > 0:06:50His poetry traces an unbroken line of continuity between the present and the often distant past.
0:06:50 > 0:06:53Since his early days as a poet,
0:06:53 > 0:06:59he has excavated the myths of classical Greece, medieval Ireland and Anglo-Saxon Britain.
0:07:04 > 0:07:11In 1999, his version of the Dark Age epic, Beowulf, found a wide audience,
0:07:11 > 0:07:17with its powerful evocation of a people exhausted by oppression but heroic in resistance.
0:07:18 > 0:07:21The Geat people built a pyre for Beowulf.
0:07:21 > 0:07:24It started four square from the ground up
0:07:24 > 0:07:29and hung helmets on it, as he had instructed,
0:07:29 > 0:07:32surrounded it with war shields and shining male.
0:07:32 > 0:07:39Then his warriors laid him in the middle of it, mourning a lord far-famed and beloved.
0:07:39 > 0:07:43On a height they kindled the biggest ever funeral fire.
0:07:43 > 0:07:47Fumes of wood smoke billowed darkly up.
0:07:47 > 0:07:50The blaze roared and drowned out their weeping.
0:07:50 > 0:07:56Wind died down and flames wrought havoc in the hot bone house burning it to the core.
0:07:56 > 0:08:02For Heaney, the mythic and the everyday co-exist in the places and people around him.
0:08:03 > 0:08:10You have drawn so much from, as it were, ancient material, for your writing,
0:08:10 > 0:08:15not literally but just infusing the way you think about it.
0:08:15 > 0:08:19Do you feel a connection with the distant past?
0:08:19 > 0:08:24There are certain areas that come home to me.
0:08:24 > 0:08:29It's not that I go to them, they come home here.
0:08:29 > 0:08:34I take the example of my own father, who is a cattle dealer
0:08:34 > 0:08:39and a very taciturn man, affectionate, but taciturn.
0:08:39 > 0:08:45And he...always dressed - he wore a soft hat.
0:08:45 > 0:08:50He went to the fairs as a cattle dealer and he carried a stick.
0:08:50 > 0:08:54He was also, oddly enough, very animated.
0:08:54 > 0:08:58He was a kind of an amateur undertaker,
0:08:58 > 0:09:02he took charge and attended to things.
0:09:02 > 0:09:07If in the extended family or among the neighbours there was a death,
0:09:07 > 0:09:14he had some form of natural responsibility or authority in running that.
0:09:14 > 0:09:19He didn't run it but he was present as someone who would adjudicate.
0:09:19 > 0:09:24Hermes, the god of marketplaces,
0:09:24 > 0:09:30carried a stick, had a hat, wore boots, my father always wore these yellow leather boots.
0:09:30 > 0:09:35Hermes led the souls of the dead down there.
0:09:35 > 0:09:39That's a very long answer to your question
0:09:39 > 0:09:44but Hermes to me was a paradigm - there I go using a word like that -
0:09:44 > 0:09:46he came home and I felt safe.
0:09:49 > 0:09:53Heaney's sense of a traditional past
0:09:53 > 0:09:58comes from his childhood on his parents' farm in County Derry.
0:09:58 > 0:10:03One of his earliest poems, about his father working,
0:10:03 > 0:10:07set out the path of his career as a poet.
0:10:07 > 0:10:14Between my finger and my thumb the squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
0:10:14 > 0:10:17Under my window a clean rasping sound
0:10:17 > 0:10:21As the spade sinks into gravelly ground.
0:10:21 > 0:10:23My father, digging. I look down
0:10:23 > 0:10:26Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
0:10:26 > 0:10:29Bends low, comes up 20 years away
0:10:29 > 0:10:33Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
0:10:33 > 0:10:35Where he was digging.
0:10:35 > 0:10:39The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
0:10:39 > 0:10:42Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
0:10:42 > 0:10:46He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
0:10:46 > 0:10:49To scatter new potatoes that we picked
0:10:49 > 0:10:53Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
0:10:53 > 0:10:57By God, the old man could handle a spade,
0:10:57 > 0:10:59Just like his old man.
0:10:59 > 0:11:02My grandfather cut more turf in a day
0:11:02 > 0:11:05Than any man on Toner's bog. Once I carried him milk in a bottle,
0:11:05 > 0:11:08Corked sloppily with paper
0:11:08 > 0:11:10He straightened up to drink it
0:11:10 > 0:11:12Then fell to right away
0:11:12 > 0:11:15Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
0:11:15 > 0:11:18Over his shoulder, going down and down
0:11:18 > 0:11:21For the good turf. Digging.
0:11:23 > 0:11:26But I've no spade to follow men like them.
0:11:26 > 0:11:29Between my finger and my thumb
0:11:29 > 0:11:32The squat pen rests.
0:11:32 > 0:11:35I'll dig with it.
0:11:38 > 0:11:41I guess the first place that I grew up...
0:11:41 > 0:11:45We moved from it when I was about 13, 14,
0:11:45 > 0:11:50and the image I sometimes have of the first life,
0:11:50 > 0:11:55that stays on in the poetry as a memory bank,
0:11:55 > 0:11:58is of the thing being hermetically sealed.
0:11:58 > 0:12:03And then in my 20s, after ten years or so, it opened.
0:12:03 > 0:12:07When you opened a hermetically sealed box of pipe tobacco
0:12:07 > 0:12:10there was a little, "Kkkkrrr",
0:12:10 > 0:12:15and there was a fragrance come up out of the slightly moist tobacco -
0:12:15 > 0:12:18better than any smoking, really.
0:12:18 > 0:12:22And I had this feeling that whatever happened to me in my 20s,
0:12:22 > 0:12:28when I started to go back into that place, was like opening the seal
0:12:28 > 0:12:32and the fragrance and the trustworthiness of it was there.
0:12:32 > 0:12:38I still feel safe, imaginatively, if I'm on that ground.
0:12:38 > 0:12:41Another poem, written much later,
0:12:41 > 0:12:46remembers moments of intimacy with his mother.
0:12:46 > 0:12:49When all the others were away at Mass
0:12:49 > 0:12:52I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
0:12:52 > 0:12:56They broke the silence, let fall one by one
0:12:56 > 0:12:59Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
0:12:59 > 0:13:03Cold comforts set between us, things to share
0:13:03 > 0:13:06Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
0:13:06 > 0:13:10And let fall again. Little pleasant splashes
0:13:10 > 0:13:14From each other's work would bring us to our senses.
0:13:14 > 0:13:17So while the parish priest at her bedside
0:13:17 > 0:13:21Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying
0:13:21 > 0:13:25And some were responding and some crying
0:13:25 > 0:13:29I remembered her head bent towards my head,
0:13:29 > 0:13:34Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives -
0:13:35 > 0:13:40Never closer the whole rest of our lives.
0:13:40 > 0:13:45As a young man, Heaney met the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh.
0:13:45 > 0:13:50It was to be a turning point in his career as a writer.
0:13:50 > 0:13:55He taught you the difference between parochialism and provincialism.
0:13:55 > 0:14:00Provincialism was just not in your radar, but parochialism was.
0:14:00 > 0:14:04That was a very good distinction he made.
0:14:04 > 0:14:10He said, "All great civilisations are based on the parish."
0:14:10 > 0:14:14And he said the provincial is always looking over its shoulder
0:14:14 > 0:14:19to see what the metropolis is saying, sucking up to the thing out there.
0:14:19 > 0:14:23I was very lucky to have Kavanagh, because he...
0:14:23 > 0:14:29Without Kavanagh, the provincial thing would have been stronger.
0:14:29 > 0:14:32Nobody lives in the parish entirely.
0:14:32 > 0:14:34Everybody lives in many, many places.
0:14:34 > 0:14:40But if you're writing, you live in the genre, in the medium.
0:14:40 > 0:14:44I wasn't unaware of London,
0:14:44 > 0:14:47but I was sure of Northern Ireland.
0:14:47 > 0:14:52Robert Lowell said the poet is the conscious of a society.
0:14:52 > 0:14:55You had to deal with the divide of a society.
0:14:55 > 0:14:58How did you find your voice?
0:14:58 > 0:15:02The voice was given to you by the division.
0:15:02 > 0:15:05It was a stealthy voice, it spoke in codes.
0:15:05 > 0:15:09It was good training for verse or for poetry,
0:15:09 > 0:15:13because words, they're depth charges,
0:15:13 > 0:15:20just in vocabulary that elsewhere would be common and nondescript, like...
0:15:20 > 0:15:23I think of the word "parish", for example.
0:15:23 > 0:15:26In Northern Ireland,
0:15:26 > 0:15:28Catholics talk about the parish.
0:15:28 > 0:15:34Terrible language, this! Protestants wouldn't use it!
0:15:34 > 0:15:39The ear, the voice, the posture within the speech community
0:15:39 > 0:15:42and the whole community
0:15:42 > 0:15:48was highly self-conscious and highly developed.
0:15:48 > 0:15:51I think that is a kind of training
0:15:51 > 0:15:56for the obliquity and stealth of literary utterance, in a way.
0:15:56 > 0:16:01But we were very afraid of exploiting it.
0:16:01 > 0:16:07We were afraid of exacerbating the division which produced the thing,
0:16:07 > 0:16:11because we understood the fury and the devotion
0:16:11 > 0:16:15to what was causing the bother on both sides -
0:16:15 > 0:16:20Loyalist and Republican ideology, or the myth of belonging.
0:16:20 > 0:16:25It was a way of trying to be just and true about the whole thing.
0:16:37 > 0:16:43In the mid-60s, Heaney published Requiem For The Croppies,
0:16:43 > 0:16:48which celebrated the Irish rebellion of 1798.
0:17:13 > 0:17:18But as the Troubles began to tear Ulster apart,
0:17:18 > 0:17:23Heaney found the meaning of the poem slipping beyond his control.
0:17:23 > 0:17:25In the Ulster of the 1966,
0:17:25 > 0:17:31that was making space for a set of just aspirations.
0:17:31 > 0:17:33Now,
0:17:33 > 0:17:38things change when that poem that I wrote about a historical moment
0:17:38 > 0:17:46began to be used by, you know, basically Provo singing groups,
0:17:46 > 0:17:49along with other rebel songs.
0:17:49 > 0:17:52It became propaganda for the IRA.
0:17:54 > 0:17:56And I stopped reading the poem.
0:17:56 > 0:18:02I wasn't mealy-mouthed about it. The context changed.
0:18:02 > 0:18:06It was perfectly in order to have a disposition
0:18:06 > 0:18:09but not a propagandist's position.
0:18:09 > 0:18:13It was extremely complicated, the whole thing,
0:18:13 > 0:18:16and, er...
0:18:16 > 0:18:22you were asking yourself, "Was this integrity or cowardice?"
0:18:22 > 0:18:29Heaney wrote requiems for ordinary people caught up in the Troubles
0:18:29 > 0:18:34or more subtle and indirect work, as in a remarkable series of poems
0:18:34 > 0:18:40inspired by the discovery of corpses in the bogs of Jutland.
0:18:40 > 0:18:47Here, Heaney found a mythic echo of sectarian murder and blood sacrifice.
0:18:47 > 0:18:51Nobody's quite sure what happened to them,
0:18:51 > 0:18:53but PV Glob, the archaeologist,
0:18:53 > 0:18:59says he thinks they're fertility sacrifices.
0:18:59 > 0:19:05They'd been in the peat so long they'd been transformed chemically,
0:19:05 > 0:19:09but also... I mustn't change their genre or their species!
0:19:09 > 0:19:16..They'd moved on from being a human trace to being an image of a human.
0:19:16 > 0:19:19I found them entrancing.
0:19:19 > 0:19:25As if he had been poured in tar, He lies on a pillow of turf
0:19:25 > 0:19:29And seems to weep the black river of himself.
0:19:29 > 0:19:33The grain of his wrists is like bog oak,
0:19:33 > 0:19:36The ball of his heel like a basalt egg.
0:19:36 > 0:19:39His instep has shrunk
0:19:39 > 0:19:41Cold as a swan's foot or a wet swamp root.
0:19:41 > 0:19:45His hips are the ridge and purse of a mussel.
0:19:45 > 0:19:49His spine, an eel arrested under a glisten of mud.
0:19:49 > 0:19:52The head lifts.
0:19:52 > 0:19:56The chin is a visor, raised above the vent of his slashed throat
0:19:56 > 0:19:59That has tanned and toughened.
0:19:59 > 0:20:05The cured wound opens inwards to a dark, elderberry place.
0:20:09 > 0:20:13I may, to tell you the truth, have interpreted them too much.
0:20:13 > 0:20:16The poems too much afterwards.
0:20:16 > 0:20:21You can do odd poems, and you know they're odd, but you can trust them.
0:20:21 > 0:20:25But then you're asked about them in an interview
0:20:25 > 0:20:30and you begin to shoehorn them in with other discourse.
0:20:30 > 0:20:37And I began to talk about the relationship of the fertility sacrifice culture
0:20:37 > 0:20:41to the culture of republicanism, of territorial religion,
0:20:41 > 0:20:45whether it's Loyalist territory or Republican.
0:20:45 > 0:20:52All that did was operative at the back of the head but I didn't mean them to be allegorical.
0:20:52 > 0:20:59But they did link into Ireland in so far as there's plenty of bog, plenty of sorrow, plenty of corpse.
0:20:59 > 0:21:02It was a way in all right.
0:21:02 > 0:21:07But Heaney was happy to be swept up in the optimism of 1995,
0:21:07 > 0:21:14when Bill Clinton visited Ireland and quoted from Heaney's version of "The Cure At Troy."
0:21:14 > 0:21:17"What's left to say?
0:21:18 > 0:21:21"Suspect too much sweet talk.
0:21:21 > 0:21:23"But never close your mind.
0:21:23 > 0:21:28"It was a fortunate wind that blew me here.
0:21:29 > 0:21:32"I leave half ready to believe
0:21:32 > 0:21:35"that a crippled trust might walk.
0:21:35 > 0:21:40"And the half true rhyme is love."
0:21:40 > 0:21:43Thank you and God bless you all.
0:21:43 > 0:21:45How did you feel about it?
0:21:45 > 0:21:50I felt grand about it. Clinton did great work in the peace process.
0:21:50 > 0:21:55He was in there. He wasn't just swank appearance.
0:21:55 > 0:22:01He was ringing Stormont. He knew the people both sides of the house.
0:22:01 > 0:22:06He also is capable of speaking poetry and, you know...
0:22:06 > 0:22:13Somebody in charge of the world who can know a work of imagination from the inside,
0:22:13 > 0:22:17apply it to the outside, do it freely, spontaneously.
0:22:17 > 0:22:22We can think of a successor who has some difficulty in doing that.
0:22:22 > 0:22:29In an increasingly secular age, do you think people turn to poetry when they can't go to Church,
0:22:29 > 0:22:32because Church has no meaning for them?
0:22:32 > 0:22:38Well...I-I think that...I do think that the word poet, and poetry,
0:22:38 > 0:22:40still retains a certain archaic aura.
0:22:40 > 0:22:46That's not self-deception just because I'm involved in it myself.
0:22:46 > 0:22:51The people whom my mother would have called the common five-eighths,
0:22:51 > 0:22:56if they hear the word "poetry", there's still a sense of stand back.
0:22:56 > 0:22:59"Not for us."
0:22:59 > 0:23:06There's that question, but I would say first of all it's almost a primal sense of difference.
0:23:06 > 0:23:11- But then there is indeed a second - socioeconomic, educational thing.
0:23:11 > 0:23:13A shyness in the face of it.
0:23:13 > 0:23:21"It's not for us." And I have been poised myself between those two worlds forever.
0:23:21 > 0:23:26And as a teacher and as a creature of the poetry world,
0:23:26 > 0:23:33I've always tried to nego...mediate between the shy and the sublime.
0:23:38 > 0:23:44When he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature that same year,
0:23:44 > 0:23:48Heaney used the occasion to hint at a new optimism.
0:23:49 > 0:23:52You received the Nobel Laureate.
0:23:52 > 0:23:59You said you wanted to make space for the marvellous as well as the murderers.
0:23:59 > 0:24:01Do you think you have?
0:24:01 > 0:24:08It's very difficult, VERY difficult, to, at this stage in our evolution as a species
0:24:08 > 0:24:14and whatever's happening in the world, to give vent to gratitude.
0:24:14 > 0:24:19One of the things about poetry, to put it this way,
0:24:19 > 0:24:24is that you know poetry's happening if you have an element of celebration
0:24:24 > 0:24:26that doesn't betray the facts.
0:24:26 > 0:24:31That isn't loony, candyfloss blather.
0:24:31 > 0:24:38That says, "This much we can celebrate. Given everything else, we can get through this far."
0:24:38 > 0:24:43Do you feel a shift in the tectonic plates then in Ireland?
0:24:43 > 0:24:48Is it emerging as a different kind of country now?
0:24:48 > 0:24:52It certainly is a different kind of country now.
0:24:52 > 0:24:57Whether it can stay that kind of country is another matter.
0:24:57 > 0:25:03The difference has been quick. It's been brought on by happy economic circumstances.
0:25:03 > 0:25:07It's been brought on by happy developments,
0:25:07 > 0:25:12gradually happy developments in the Northern Ireland situation.
0:25:13 > 0:25:19But, you know, supposing 350 corporate firms pull out,
0:25:19 > 0:25:23supposing the American corporate Republican sector
0:25:23 > 0:25:28so Ireland is not disaffected politically from the US.
0:25:28 > 0:25:34Supposing TV showed protests against George Bush when he comes to Ireland.
0:25:34 > 0:25:41These things are very fickle nowadays and it could go back to certainly a less prosperous society.
0:25:41 > 0:25:45You'd not go back to the religious society that we had.
0:25:45 > 0:25:52You'd not go back to the place where the individual conscience was...
0:25:52 > 0:25:57was taken charge of by...by the teaching church.
0:25:57 > 0:26:05You won't go back to the grief and terror, and benediction it has to be said, of the confessional.
0:26:05 > 0:26:07That's all gone.
0:26:07 > 0:26:14It is...I guess it is a new Ireland but I'm partly in the old one still.
0:26:14 > 0:26:16- Do you think so?- Definitely.
0:26:16 > 0:26:22The person I am was formed there. I went to a school run by priests.
0:26:22 > 0:26:26I examined my conscience. I had a notion of sin.
0:26:26 > 0:26:30Uh...all those traces are in me still.
0:26:30 > 0:26:35I mean, just as people who were on rationing during in the war
0:26:35 > 0:26:39can't quite believe in a basket of fruit, you know?
0:26:39 > 0:26:46When you see the freedoms and you see the pleasures being enjoyed,
0:26:46 > 0:26:51that's a very good thing, but, um...
0:26:51 > 0:26:54I also like an odd mixture of fear.
0:26:59 > 0:27:05I belong to the old Ireland also in the sense that if I go out to the west or to Donegal
0:27:05 > 0:27:10or to Kerry and see an empty space on the mountainside,
0:27:10 > 0:27:13I sort of feel at home.
0:27:17 > 0:27:20And some time make the time
0:27:20 > 0:27:24To drive out west into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore
0:27:24 > 0:27:29In September or October, when the wind and the light are working off each other
0:27:29 > 0:27:34So that the ocean on one side is wild with foam and glitter,
0:27:34 > 0:27:39And inland among stones, the surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
0:27:39 > 0:27:42By the earthed lightening of flock of swans.
0:27:42 > 0:27:47Useless to think you'll park and capture it more thoroughly.
0:27:47 > 0:27:50You are neither here nor there.
0:27:50 > 0:27:54A hurry through which known and strange things pass,
0:27:54 > 0:27:58As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
0:27:58 > 0:28:03And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.
0:28:26 > 0:28:30Subtitles by BBC Broadcast - 2004
0:28:30 > 0:28:33E-mail us at subtitling@bbc.co.uk