Something to Write Home About: Seamus Heaney

The secret of writing poetry, it has been said, is to find

is at bottom your child mind,

that a poet's words and subjects

So, what I want to do is to explore

But I'd like to think that the subject not only leads back there,

to step into the same river twice.

The River Moyola flows south-east

and enters Lough Neagh just a

linking the townland of Broagh to the townland of Bellshill.

We used to paddle around the gravel

and I always loved venturing out from one stepping stone to the

next, right into the middle

For even though the river was narrow enough and shallow enough,

there was a feeling of daring

into the main flow of the current.

away from the safety of the bank,

You were giddy and rooted to the spot at one and the same time.

Your body stood stock-still,

But your head would be light and swimming from the rush of the river

at your feet and the big, stately

in the sky above your head.

Nowadays when I think of that child

I see a little version of the god the Romans called Terminus,

The Romans kept an image of Terminus

on Capitol Hill and the interesting

above the place where the image sat

and the borders of the Earth needed

the whole unlimited height and width and depth of the heavens themselves.

boundaries are necessary evils

the truly desirable condition

is the feeling of being unbounded,

Terminus appears in many Irish place

meaning the glebe land attached to

land of any sort marked off for

from very early on, I recognised

was a special marker of a very

but also when I stood on the bridge

and look directly down at the flow where the trout were darting about

where my mother's people lived in a terraced house with an archway

of roses over the front pathway and a vegetable garden at the back.

Castledawson could have been in any

spick-and-span English mill village,

In this case, the factory horn

and then to let them all go home.

Home to New Row and Boyne Row,

and the Protestant church, up past the entrance to Moyola Park

where the Castledawson soccer team

Chichester-Clarks lived their life

behind the walls of their demesne.

All that was, mentally, on one side of the river, as well as physically.

On the other, there was the parish of Bellaghy or Ballyscullion,

Their kitchens had open fires rather

Their houses stood in the middle of fields rather than in a terrace.

And the people who lived in them

listened to the cattle roaring

I knew the Ballaghy side of things was not only in a different

physical place, but in a sort of different cultural space as well.

In my mind, Bellaghy belonged not only to Gaelic football, but also

to the much older Gaelic order of cattle herding and hillforts.

first Monday of every month.

The streets would be crammed with cows and heifers and bullocks

the whole place loud and stinking

of unruly activity like that

Castledawson was a far more

more a part of the main drag.

The very name of the place is from

whereas Bellaghy - Baile Eachaidha -

more obscure origin, in Irish.

So, as I once said in a poem,

a poem called Terminus, as a

between the predominantly loyalist

and the predominantly nationalist and Catholic district of Bellaghy.

On a border between townlands

clear ring of the Ulster Irish

to the Gaeltacht or Rannafast.

like the word "hoke", for example.

not standard English and it's not an Irish language word either,

as far as I know, but it is there at the foundation of speech,

under me, like the floor of the

Something to write home about,

It means to root about or delve into

in a poem when the poem is writing itself or you are writing the poem.

The poem kind of gets its nose

hokes its way towards the very centre of what it's really concerned with,

And in fact, it was the word

an acorn and a rusted bolt.

If I listened, an engine shunting

Is it any wonder when I thought

I would have second thoughts?

and not be forced into second

People are being brought up against different boundaries all the time.

One person says too many cooks

the other person says many hands

One person says Ulster is British,

the other person says Ulster is

You say potato on your side of the I say "potatto" on my side.

These contradictions are part of being a member of the human species.

But in Northern Ireland they have taken on a special local intensity.

It shone like gifts of the Nativity.

When they spoke of the Mammon

and the march drain drains banks

that I used to hear again and again

One farm marched another farm, one field marched another field

to border upon and be bordered upon.

It was a word that acknowledged

but it also contained a definite

If my land marched your land,

we were bound by that boundary as well as separated by it.

In the kitchen of the house where

and it is one of the first memories

I have, of my feet touching

I must have been just two or

I used to lean down and take the boards out of the bottom of the cot,

and there was a terrific surprise

small foot touched the actual cold cement, the smoothness of it.

Then something more gradual,

through your foot, coming into you.

You felt confirmed within yourself just by being there on the ground.

I'm in two places at once really,

on the floor and within that big

that the feel of the floor opened

When my feet touched that floor I knew I was on my way somewhere.

But whereto I could not have said.

Nowadays, I would say it was

"What is important", Basho wrote,

in the world of true understanding

"and returning to the world of our daily experience to seek

"therein the truth of beauty.

"No matter what we may be doing at a given moment, we must not forget

of Terminus, the Roman god of

boundary that entered into me

I used to carry a can of milk in the evenings from our house

to a house across the fields from us.

My journey from home to the back door of that house was short,

no more than a few hundred yards,

but in my imagination I covered a great distance every time.

I still experience that old familiar

For between the two doorsteps there were several borders.

In fact, that whole country was

ditches and hedges and drains.

On my way to school, I crossed a stream, just a trickle in a

culvert under the road that turned into this drain between the fields.

But actually even though it looked

it was a very important boundary. This was called the Sluggan.

It divided first of all two

it divided the townland of Leitrim

It divided the townland of Tamniarn

Then it divided two parishes,

and the parish of Newbridge.

It actually also divided therefore

the diocese of Derry, running away

on this side, and the diocese of Armagh running right down to

Drogheda, the Boyne in the Irish Republic on the other side.

It was also, in my own life, a division because at the age

I used to move my loyalties across from Bellaghy to Castledawson.

I played football for Castledawson.

I was moving backwards and forwards across the division all the time.

lands which were subsequently

County of Coleraine in the period

between the Flight of the Earls and the beginning of the Plantation.

is the area known in the document

There included are the names of Tamniarn, Leitrim and Shanmullagh,

which was the old Irish name for the place we now call Castledawson.

Two buckets were easier carried than

When I stood on the central

I was the last earl on horseback,

parleying in the earshot of his

One of the great figures of Irish history in the pre-Plantation

period was Hugh O'Neill, Earl

leader to hold out against the Tudor armies of Queen Elizabeth I,

the last earl to make a stand and one of the first to suffer

within himself the claims of two different political allegiances

which still operate with such

and therefore in the understanding of Queen Elizabeth, the English

Queen's loyal representative in the

descended from the mythic Irish leader Niall of the Nine Hostages

and to the Irish he therefore

leader of the Gaelic O'Neills

as a defender of the Gaelic inquest

of those long, drawn-out campaigns that never ceases to fascinate me.

early in September 1599 after

the English army up into his own

The leader of the English forces

in the portrait, who was the first

and managed to draw Essex up to the River Lagan, which is a little

tributary of the River Glyde

He drew Essex's forces up here for a parley on the banks of the river.

It is a famous moment often

O'Neill on his horse in the middle of the river with the water

behind him on the other bank his forces, Irish-speaking...

talking to O'Neill in English,

Everybody could see what was

But for both the central characters, this was a mysterious moment

if you like a frozen frame in

O'Neill already a traitor in the eyes of Elizabeth, but Essex,

on the verge of catastrophe really

executed, as a matter of fact,

because of this, very soon, and O'Neill will suffer ultimate

For the moment, out in the middle

The river runs, the big sky moves.

Earl on horseback in midstream

still parleying, in earshot of his

in the mid-1980s when the political

situation in Northern Ireland was totally locked and blocked.

Maybe that is one reason why it

The poem seems to be saying that the inheritance of a divided

that it traps the people into

predetermined positions and hampers all creative movement and freedom.

Running water never disappointed.

Crossing water always furthered

It began with the recollection of

neighbour said about a field of ours that marched our field

of his and was divided from it

Then the poem went on to play with the notion of separation, of

Mournfully on in the kitchen

Would the knock come to the door

And the casual whistle strike up

But now I stand behind him in the dark yard, in the moan of players.

Shyly, as if he were party to lovemaking or a stranger's weeping.

Should I slip away, I wonder, or go up and touch his shoulder

and talk about the weather or

when I thought The Other Side

In the face of everything that was

assassinations and explosions,

I thought it was too benign and too

But then still it struck me,

people from whatever side have to go on living in the same old place.

that as a symbol of the reality of our lives, the march drain is

a better one for contemplating

The marching season is O'Neill and Essex on either side of the river.

of our experience embittered.

The march drain seems to me

to offer a way towards what

Basho called "the world of true

whole of the Earth instantly to be below and sustain the march drain.

That seems to me to be something

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