Seamus Heaney: Out of the Marvellous

The annals say:

When the monks of Clonmacnoise

Were all at prayers inside the oratory

A ship appeared above them in the air.

The anchor dragged along behind so deep

It hooked itself into the altar rails

And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,

A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope

And struggled to release it.

But in vain.

"This man can't bear our life here and will drown," the abbot said,

"Unless we help him."

So they did,

The freed ship sailed

And the man climbed back

Out of the marvellous as he had known it.

The ship comes along,

it's in the air.

The abbot looks up, the community look up, they see a ship in the air.

It doesn't take a fizz out of them, according to the chronicler.

But the crewman who comes down and goes to the edge at the bottom,

goes back up again...

He's a successful Orpheus, if you like.

He goes into the Underworld, gets what he needs

and comes up with it and sails off.

And I suppose in so far as that is the case,

he's a figure of the successful,

as TS Elliot would say, "raid on the inarticulate", you know.

Or the immersion in the other, in the visionary.

You dwell in your dream world, in your fantasy, in your own conscience.

And also, you dwell in the wide-awake,

up-and-at-it world of day to day.

If you're too deep into either one,

you aren't living the right life.

To write lyric poetry 12 hours a day, seven days a week,

a whole month, whole year,

maybe somebody could do it, but there are very few.

I always had this notion that you earned your living

and your poetry was a grace.

GULLS SQUAWK

While I'm certainly at home in north and south Ireland,

my home in the conventional sense is in Dublin.

The word now has been Americanised. People buy and sell homes!

And just with the age we're in and the age I am

and the trade I'm in with words,

scepticism and analysis and caution have crept in around the word home.

We came in here in 1976.

This attic was smaller at the time.

And it had a kind of snugness and it was up above the house, secure.

This was where I did any writing I did for many years, up here.

But this room has a deep kind of support system in it psychically.

The table under the window there,

it came from my aunt's

and uncle's place in County Derry.

I remember where it sat in one of those old-style kitchens,

country kitchens, with an open fire.

Under thatch. It was always scrubbed.

So it belongs in a previous life

and it's kind of talismanic, really, there.

I don't sit staring out of it,

but it's got a view of the shipping on the Irish Sea.

It is quite entrancing, really.

You don't really have to look, you just... It's there.

There's always a ship moving or a ferry coming in or a ferry going out.

I keep thinking of Auden's...

Auden has a line in one of my favourite Auden poems.

"Look, stranger, on this island now

"The leaping light for your delight discovers."

But, he says, "Far off like floating seeds the ships

"Diverge upon their urgent, voluntary errands."

I dwell in this house and in the cities

and Heaney lives in the country

and in his memory and elsewhere.

BIRDSONG

POIGNANT INSTRUMENTAL

That part of the world, up around Mossbawn, Anahorish,

Lagans Road, where the school was,

I love that ground.

And I... It's a...

pleasure to me to go back to it.

The word Mossbawn, to me, it had terrific,

er...fragrance, depth, security...

trustworthiness, nesting.

It has changed, of course, immensely.

It used to be a thatched house, traditional, whitewashed,

long, what they would have called a cabin.

With the horse in the stable at one end of the house

and at the far end, my parents' room with the new children,

the baby in the cot and the very baby-baby in the pram

and three beds in the bedroom and people disposed and...

somebody else in the cot in the kitchen in between.

My mother was compassionate,

religious, very empathetic.

She had great feeling for other people's anxieties, worries.

She induced a sense in me, I think, of obligation to others.

My mother, for example, would say, if you're going out to a dance,

"Don't forget to dance with the girls that aren't being danced with."

She had that kind of care for others.

When all the others were away at mass

I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.

They broke the silence, let fall one by one

Like solder weeping off the soldering iron.

She was a strong, courageous person.

I know that now psychologically.

She had great stamina to survive, for example,

nine births inside about 12 years.

And to keep good heart,

lack of bitterness,

keep a kind of shine on her presence.

I remembered her head bent towards my head,

Her breath in mine,

Our fluent dipping knives -

Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

There were two women in my life very early on.

My mother and my father's sister lived in the house with us, Mary.

She belonged, really, more in the yard world.

Mary milked the cows and she worked in the garden and so on.

She did other things too, of course, about the house.

Her hands scuffled over the bakeboard.

The reddening stove sent its plaque of heat against her

Where she stood in a floury apron by the window.

The subject matter that I put in the baking of bread

is as important as anything else because it's a ritual thing.

It's a fragrant moment.

It characterises security and the reality of that house and that place.

Sunlight, bread, the meal-bin.

-Anyway, that's...

-And love.

-And love, yeah.

-Which is the big thing.

-Yep, yep. The word is risked in that poem.

For the first time. The word's not mentioned that often.

But I think it's a big word, you know.

-Yeah.

-Would you be careful about that word, about using that word?

I'll be very careful about using it, yeah, yeah.

Er...

I think so, yeah.

Here is a space again,

The scone rising to the tick of two clocks.

And here is love

Like a tinsmith's scoop

Sunk past its gleam in the meal-bin.

When I started to write in the 1960s,

your book came out and it was a textual event

and it was an event in reviewing and in journalism

and maybe a photograph in the newspaper.

APPLAUSE

But over the last 40...50 years, really,

the appearance of a book becomes a publishing event, as they say.

There's no way of responding adequately

to the generous introduction.

Except to say I think it was very, very good and, er...

LAUGHTER

'Self-presentation, self-invention,

'it comes about as a result

'of your temperament and your general either wariness or recklessness.'

-You are going to be right over here.

-Right. Thanks.

I think I'll go into the middle.

-A drink of water would be great.

-I'll get you a bottle of water.

'Inevitably, nowadays, with interviews and with television

'and with radio and with the whole promotional aspect of things,

'unless you take a kind of Beckettian or Frielian standoff,

'you're into some kind of self-presentation.

'And it's an uneasy position to be in, really.

'Because you're coming between a work and an audience

'and, er...you're doing it deliberately.'

Are there many people...? Oh, I'm going to have to say this.

Ladies and gentlemen, if you're going to get books signed here,

please don't ask me to say, "For..." you know, I'm sorry about that,

but I have to get home, so have you.

LAUGHTER

Of course, Seamus' coming back is a great event.

It's a particular moment for us

because he taught with us for so long

and we are awfully glad to see him again.

And we always will be. But this has been

an absence of something like four year, I think, you said.

I used to feel when Seamus came that it was like Persephone coming back.

You know, that finally poetry was back on campus.

One, two, one, two.

It's not just Harvard that comes to hear Seamus read,

it's Boston, Cambridge, Belmont, Arlington, New Hampshire, Vermont.

People stream in from everywhere.

HUBBUB

When you read a poem, if you're a critic, as I am, the first response

is always, "I like this," or, "I don't like this."

I can't help that, that's the judgment that comes first.

But then the poem works on you and you begin to be curious

about how it got to be so good.

She has the gift for articulating, clarifying

and teasing out in order

what is quickly, simultaneously there in a phrase

or in a poem or in a cadence.

So she's a teacher as much as anything else, Helen, I think.

She teaches poetry to you.

She can teach your own poem to you, you know, in a way.

Seamus is ready.

He's a poet, not only of all of Ireland, but of the whole world.

And he has succeeded in being both a poet of a region

and its boundaries, but also a poet of wide circumspection,

thinking about the world at large,

as well as the boundaries of his own country.

Seamus Heaney.

RAPTUROUS APPLAUSE

The future was a verb in hibernation.

A spirit moved,

John Harvard walked the yard.

Before the classic style,

Before the clapboard,

All through the small hours of an origin,

The books stood open and the gates unbarred.

'I don't think poetry makes you a better person or anything like that.

'Wordsworth had it right, it's a pleasure.

'It's a sophisticated pleasure, it's a learnt pleasure.

'And I think you do have to develop a sense of it.'

So this is one of the most unromantic titles in Irish poetry.

It's called, Two Lorries. And...

LAUGHTER

And one lorry is in the 1940s...

'If you go into rock music, into rock concerts, into the popular music,

'into the media, it is, on the whole, oral and aural.

'It isn't literary, it isn't literate.

'It's post-literate, or pre-literate, if you want.

'Poems that were learnt by heart belong as little constellations.

'They're little straws that the mind clutches at at times.

'And I don't think you could go much further than that

'in justifying it as a...a utilitarian thing.'

You're neither here nor there.

A hurry through which known and strange things pass

As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways

And catch the heart off-guard and blow it open.

Thank you very much.

RAPTUROUS APPLAUSE

Thank you very much.

BELLS PEAL

I sat all morning in the college sick bay

Counting bells knelling classes to a close.

I was at St Columb's College, a border,

and I was called to the president's office one morning

and I was told that my young brother, Christopher,

had been killed on the road the night before in County Derry.

He was out with other brothers.

He ran across the road from behind a bus, he was struck by a car,

taken to hospital, died within three hours.

I came home from college the next day to the wake.

CHURCH BELLS TOLL

Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,

Away at school, as my mother held my hand in hers

And coughed out angry tearless sighs.

I always remember my father saying to me the morning of the funeral...

.."Don't you be crying now or the others will cry too."

And I always remember also, the little white coffin.

Walking through the village of Bellaghy,

towards the church behind the coffin.

It was a very sore, grievous thing for us all,

but especially for my mother and father.

In the culture of rural Ireland, in those days,

you didn't think of your father as suffering grief.

It was the mother who was suffering grief and undoubtedly,

that was the case.

I mean, for all her life afterwards,

any news of any accident, any loss,

it just reactivated grief and sympathy in her heart.

And I'm sure in his, but my father was more stoical and less expressive.

CHURCH BELLS TOLL

I saw him for the first time in six weeks.

Paler now, wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,

He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.

No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four-foot box, a foot for every year.

BIRDSONG

I'm not working all the time, by any means.

I'm what the poet Tom Paulin called a binge writer.

I go in little flurries of it.

And I can go without writing for a good while,

which creates anxiety, of course.

But, er...anxiety is part of it.

Faber and Faber, to me, meant almost an unearthly address

when I first encountered it.

In those days, it was 24 Russell Square,

so it was the acme of poetry publishing.

It was the place where TS Eliot was published.

TS Eliot came in here around about 1923, I think.

All the canonical modern poets were published here.

Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, TS Eliot.

And my sense of it since 1965

was it was a house with a family element to it.

'And a sense of tradition.'

Everything OK.

'It was also, in the deep, medieval sense,'

there was a mystery, the mysteria,

mystique of poetry and of literature.

So there's a sense of guardianship and, er,

domestic responsibility for the art of literature.

I think that's right about the firm being a family firm,

having that sense of not playing the game for the next quarter

or the next 12 months.

It's always about the steady understanding

that this is a game played over a long period of time.

It takes a long time for a poet to find a broader audience.

And when the mystical thing happens,

when a poet suddenly moves out of that and into...

Well, into the education system, for instance,

and also into the general readers' arena,

that comes at the strangest of moments over a period of time

for reasons that you're not entirely in control of.

But I think it's the steadfast publishing of the poetry

as a sort of tight cannon becomes all the more important

because then you're just always presenting the work.

You're never overstating it, you're never trying to hype unnecessarily,

you're just saying, "Here is the body of work,

"we have confidence that in time, this will reach a broad readership."

UPBEAT INSTRUMENTAL

We got married in August, 1965.

Just after my book had been accepted by Faber's.

We went to London on our honeymoon.

I'd never been to Faber and Faber.

I knew that we were going to be close to the thing

and we made an appointment to go there.

It was both a social call and a slight change of life,

going as an author into a publishing house.

And by coincidence,

we met Philip Larkin that day in the offices of Faber and Faber.

As we were going out, Larkin was coming in to meet Monteith.

And we kind of shook hands with this tall,

as he called himself in those days, "A balding salmon of a man."

It was like the beginning of clearly a new life,

not just marriage-wise,

but in Seamus' terms, literary-wise.

And I think, maybe the first book you bought me was The Less Deceived,

which had just come out, by Larkin, because I loved him.

And to walk in and see this man the day after your honeymoon

and Charles Monteith... Seamus said, "This is my wife."

We'd been married less than 24 hours.

And Charles Monteith said, "How long have you been married?"

Isn't that what he said?

"Have you been married long?"

-Seamus said, shamefacedly, "Yesterday."

-Yes.

A lot of the poems throughout the world would be

out of a marriage or into a marriage

and about the different tests and...

..you know, what's called for,

er...in a match, er...

I think we are a well-matched pair, if...if...different.

And, er...

In my green corner.

LAUGHTER

Well, there is an element of that and that's a refreshment,

er...to have...to have energy and, er... Yeah.

CRICKETS CHIRP

After 11 years, I was composing love letters again,

Broaching the word 'wife' like a stored cask.

The beautiful, useless tang of eucalyptus spelt your absence.

The aftermath of a mouthful of wine

Was like inhaling you off a cold pillow.

It has become a very well-known poem.

And I loved it for... Obviously, because it's such an erotic,

exotic love poem.

Up, black, striped and damasked

Like the chasuble at a funeral mass,

The skunk's tail paraded the skunk.

Night after night I expected her like a visitor.

The Skunk began with a memory of sitting in California.

I was told that this family of skunks were arriving.

Just to sit very still if they came along

and let them go past, nothing would happen.

So, sure enough, I was there one night and it was just, eh...

the skunk herself, not little ones, no skunkettes or skunkeens.

So she went across from me, I would say she was just like Mae West,

proceeded with the tail up across the veranda.

It was something beautiful - invitational.

Dreamlike.

It all came back to me last night,

Stirred by the sootfall of your things at bedtime,

Your head down, tail-up hunt in a bottom drawer

For the black plunge-line nightdress.

Seamus is very truthful. The love poems,

and they are wonderful love poems,

a lot of them are, they are not what an absolutely wonderful

harmonious life we have together,

that's not what all of them say.

And to have someone express that extremely well after the event

can, sort of, bring you up short.

None of them have hurt me or anything but they have been

more truthful than maybe I would have admitted to myself.

IMITATES COCKNEY ACCENT: Well, that's what it's all about, isn't it?

That's what it's all about!

LAUGHTER

I think the act of writing, actually, is an escape,

if possible, from self-obsession.

The self may be the material...

If the rays, the thing comes through,

if the made thing happens, you have escaped.

Characteristically, when you're starting,

you write for the high of finishing, the speed

and the pleasure of it

and get there and get it down and,

"Ha!" Breast the tape. It's a sprint. Joy.

But...the older you get,

once you get started, you want to keep it going!

There are analogies that could be brought up here, but...

-Bring them up...

-Well, if you like...

LAUGHTER

..prolong the pleasure and keep it going for as long as possible.

The actual joy of working is...

the reward, I would say, now, for me.

To be absorbed in it and to

make it lengthen out and to develop it.

But there's no rule.

The reason I came to the United States is to take part

in The New Yorker Festival.

It's an invitation on behalf of The New Yorker to be

interviewed by Paul, that's why I'm here.

APPLAUSE

Well, the first time we met was in Armagh in the upstairs,

I think, in the library or the museum on the mall, in 1968.

I was 16 and, of course, I was writing poems

with all the fury

of a 16-year-old.

I always remember getting the poems,

written in longhand and unmistakeably the work of a decided stylist

and already on his way.

AMPLIFIED SPEECH TO CROWD

An older poet feels responsible in a way that an older novelist

doesn't feel responsible for younger novelists.

That there is a... I use the word "guild", it's not quite right.

There used to be the old word,

the mystery of the, the togetherness of the thing.

I'm absolutely certain that there would have been people who

would have liked the idea that Seamus and I, for example.

-would be at loggerheads.

-Uh-hm.

Absolutely. Because that's a bit of news, that would be a bit of news.

The fact that we get on and that we're very close friends

is not news.

The image that I've always found the most fascinating in that poem

-is the one of the scone rising to the tick of two clocks.

-Yes.

There's some kind of tension between these two clocks

which I think, actually, contributes to the...

the charge of the poem in a way that I don't quite understand,

but may even appeal to information beyond the poem...

-your aunt and your mother in the house...

-That's right.

Um, is there any...?

That's very good, this is a revelation now...

LAUGHTER

'Seamus certainly has made comments on my poems over

'those 40 years that have been very helpful.'

And I would like to think maybe in the other direction, too.

-Likewise, yeah, yeah.

-The thing is, you see,

you really need another opinion no matter who...

-what the name is at the bottom of the page.

-Yeah.

Our capacity for self-delusion, at least mine,

I don't know about yours,

but my capacity for self-delusion is just...it's infinite.

APPLAUSE

I would say up to the age of 50, I was hearing and listening

and talking about people who were on the move and I think

that there's a kind of care and excitement.

All poets are young poets, actually, when they are alive,

that's the pleasure of it.

You know how Jupiter

Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head

Before he hurls the lightning?

Well, just now

He galloped his thunder cart and his horses

Across a clear blue sky.

It was written after the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

But it's based upon a poem by Horace, the poem wrote in Latin.

I had talked about this poem and taught it

a year previously in Harvard in the fall, as they say,

in the autumn of 2000.

Horace hears thunder in the middle of the day, is shocked.

The thunder is powerful, it comes just like that "bang".

And he is rattled by the thunder.

I talked about this and about surprise

and about the value of that for a writer.

Then...

the attacks occur on the...

..eh, the World Trade Centre and all that desolation and shock.

And just at that point, shortly after that,

I remember this poem and I look it up again and it has references

to the Atlantic shore.

A reference to the world being a place of violence.

References to "summis" the highest things being shaken.

So, I did a version of it where I left out one stanza

and added another one.

"Anything can happen, the tallest towers..."

The tallest towers be overturned,

Those in high places daunted

Those overlooked regarded.

This is, actually, in the text.

The last stanza is my own, I added it on but I think it's in the spirit

of danger and in the spirit of shock

that's in the Horace, in the beginning.

"Ground gives", it says...

Ground gives.

The heaven's weight

Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle lid.

Capstones shift.

Nothing resettles right.

Telluric ash and fire-spores boil away.

RUMBLING

It was impossible for me to avoid a political situation in what

I wrote, from the beginning.

You're in the polis as a writer.

Political comes from the word polis in Greek meaning...

the community, the city-state, whatever.

And if there's anything close to a city-state intimacy in

our life in Ireland and Britain, wherever,

Northern Ireland is a cockpit.

I don't know how big Athens was but, Derry and Belfast put together

are a kind of Athenian situation.

So, I think responses to that and holding that, either in focus,

at bay or taking it in, necessarily makes you a political writer.

That fist would drop a hammer on a Catholic -

Oh, yes, that kind of thing could start again

The only Roman collar he tolerates

Smiles all round his sleek pint of porter.

In the '60s, things were opening up and a, kind of,

open North was a possibility, a tolerance was a possibility.

I didn't think much, in the beginning, about British or Irish.

OK, I lived in the North, I had a British scholarship,

I carried a British passport at that stage, didn't think too much

one way or another. Carried a British passport to go to Lourdes!

You know, so, so the double identity thing was something you lived with.

Sectarianism isn't a great subject but...

it was in our life there.

The sense of not having a voice in the community was there.

The sense of, not quite being an outsider...

I hate these kind of weepy, victim-status remarks like

"second-class citizen" and so on, they're so sloganised.

But it was present, all right, for sure.

It was a caste system, basically,

you were a different caste from the ruling caste.

The fact that somebody called Seamus published a book in London

with Fabers, simply the name, Seamus Heaney - Death Of A Naturalist.

A poem in it called Docker, which says -

"That fist would drop a hammer on a Catholic..."

There was opening some kind of space to let Irish Nationalist or

Republican feeling breathe in this atmosphere.

Christmas 1969, I bought myself a book called The Bog People.

It was a completely exciting text.

Not only text, but the photographs about bog bodies found in Denmark.

The theory was that a lot of these bodies were sacrificed

for the renewal of life.

The main thing was the entrancement of the photographs

and the material

and the landscapes they came out of.

The most famous, the Tollund Man, was found by two old brothers

digging in a bog.

And I could see it happening in Tamlaghtduff or whatever.

It was mythopoeiac material.

Every poet I knew wanted to get at it, in a way.

Out there in Jutland

In the old man-killing parishes

I will feel lost,

Unhappy and at home.

The killing had started in the North at that stage...

by 1970...

The Tollund Man, to me, was an emblem of grief...

and violence and intimate violence.

The head lifts,

The chin is a visor

Raised above the vent

Of his slashed throat.

The material kept promising. First of all, because of its

relevance to violence around the place.

But also because of its intimacy with the very land I grew up in.

I could feel this in my...nostrils, the feeling of a bog.

I could feel what it must have been like to be dumped in there.

And a lot of those poems in North,

which are strange things,

they come out of the book, they come out of my intimacy with the bog

as a domain. They come out of the situation where the writer was

expected to address the violence around about him.

But now he lies perfected in my memory,

Down to the red horn of his nails,

Hung in the scales with beauty and atrocity.

I did the Station Island pilgrimage three times at least.

I think I did it twice while we were at university.

It was an end-of-term bus ride to Pettigo

and it was a gang went, that kind of flirtatious undergraduates,

giggling young women and men.

And there was an element of courtship and all that involved in it.

We were practising young Catholics, so to speak.

HE CHUCKLES

Er, it was the Catholic Student Society.

It was part of the folklore of the subculture of Irish Catholicism.

Part of the mission of the young graduate in my time was

to secularise yourself, you know.

I mean, to Joyce-ify yourself, if possible.

Any literary reading of the 20th century...

..leads to that challenge to faith.

The doctrinal observance, the practising Catholicism...

it just went.

Definitely, I have what you would call a Catholic imagination.

Insofar as, I found it difficult and unnecessary, indeed, to...

deconstruct the shape received, that is, of...

of a here and now

and a big otherwhere, elsewhere.

After my parents died...

after I was at these deathbeds and, you ask yourself - "What happened?"

It was something totally simple.

Life - life gone - death.

Corpse.

HE CLAPS HIS HANDS

Er...the word... all those old words that, er...

you were taught about soul when you were at school and the

soul was a white handkerchief and you dirtied it when you sinned

and so on, and that, that inadequate equipment was given to you

and you didn't think much about it

and you didn't think much about leaving it.

But then, later on, I thought, "You know, well, these words 'soul'

"and 'spirit', they represent a reality."

I mean, it's a large...

..indeterminate, inchoate space,

but the language has a way of gesturing towards it anyway.

The poems I wrote after my mother died are called Clearances

and it was about the fall of a tree, OK,

but, I mean, when a tree falls, there is this extra light that comes

just in a moment.

That was the image I had.

...my coeval

Chestnut from a jam jar in a hole,

Its heft and hush become a bright nowhere,

A soul ramifying and for ever

Silent, beyond silence listened for.

Is there anything in your poems in any way useful as an epitaph?

HE CHUCKLES

Er, I don't...

I think we'll leave that one, Charlie.

Really...?

I don't know, eh...

As an epitaph...

I remember when Czeslaw Milosz died,

I translated a bit out of Oedipus At Colonus

where the old king is called by a mysterious voice to come up the hill

and he disappears mysteriously into the ground, out of the ground,

into the ground.

And the messenger tells the story and he says,

"Wherever that man went he went gratefully."

Something like that.

So...

that is not an epitaph, necessarily, for the graveyard, but

it's the kind of epitaph that would work, I think, would do.

I would, absolutely, not set myself up as a muse

and I would hate to use that term about myself

or for anybody else to.

Muse - it represents an energy, which is probably related originally,

to the erotic, among other things,

and it, it does stand for some kind of psychic energy,

mystery, if you like.

Undoubtedly, it's an allowable term, I think.

I disallow it, a bit, to myself, actually.

Bushing the door

My arms full of wild cherry and rhododendron,

I hear her small lost weeping through the hall

That bells and hoarsens on my name

My name

O love, here is the blame.

I recognise myself in most of the poems.

It is there, the whole, sort of,

trajectory of, of a marriage.

When the children were very young,

I think most males would have to deal with this,

when someone has three young children,

which is 48 hours a day, sort of thing.

Seamus did need peace to do his work as anybody does and

I was always grateful to have it. I would hate anyone to say

at the end of all this,

"If he had been married to someone else who made less demands on him,

"he would have done better."

I was very...I am very aware of that.

And she:

"I have closed my widowed ears

"To the sulphurous news of poets and poetry

"Why could you not have, oftener, in our years

"Unclenched, and come down laughing from your room

"And walked the twilight with me and your children...?"

If anybody's blamed in that poem, it's Seamus blaming himself.

Even though the words of blame are put into my mouth, in fact,

the blame is...emanates from Seamus...

and regret, about himself.

But, do you think...is it blame? I don't know...

Well, there's an element of, you know...

"Why did you not oftener come down from that room...?"

Oh, aye, aye, that's true.

LAUGHTER

-Blame!

-I think that's good craic, really.

-Yeah.

I've lived in America quite a bit.

I've lived in Belfast.

I've lived in Dublin.

There are hardly any Dublin poems.

I think that only means that whatever brings the self alive

is in the memory.

The cityscape doesn't appear.

It doesn't mean I'm against it in any way, it just means that

it doesn't have any imaginative aura.

CHATTERING

I first came across Derek as a textual creature.

I came across his poems.

The book's meant a lot to me.

We went to a conference on Caribbean literature and

spoke about this man, long before I met him.

We did meet in 1979, I remember that. Derek had sent me a note to say

he objected to derogatory remarks that were made

by A Alvarez in The New York Review Of Books,

so he was in New York

and we met in Pete's Tavern on Washington Irving Place.

That...1979.

I got a call, a phone call...

..from where I was staying and it was very peremptory

and authoritative.

It said, "Come now."

So this was Seamus Heaney, so I had to go.

CHATTERING

Well, I write plays myself and I write in verse.

And I just think that verse is a very natural medium for theatre,

it's not a...an archaic or old-fashioned medium.

My real preoccupation in doing the book, even as a libretto,

was the diction of the piece.

Which had to be credible diction.

Now, that's very hard, that's not common.

SINGING

I think all 20th-century poets now have learnt to adapt

colloquiality and the sublime, and certainly Yeats has it.

And I think Seamus' tone, the pitch of his writing is extremely

accessible for the voice.

I was elated and moved that Derek had committed himself to so much work

and committed his own talents to doing this.

It's no small commitment to be here for a month with,

with work that is not your own work.

First time directing an opera, taking a risk.

So, I was moved and, er...

proud!

The Italians say "Traduttore, traditore" -

"The translator is a traitor."

The languages I know aren't particularly suited to my poems

in translation. I know French well enough to read it.

HE SPEAKS IN FRENCH

It flows upwards.

SHE SPEAKS IN FRENCH

And my voice in poems I kind of go to the floor.

SHE SPEAKS IN GERMAN

With the genius of a language like Spanish, it's much more rhetorical

than any way I write.

HE SPEAKS IN SPANISH

When I heard Death Of A Naturalist translated into Dutch,

it was kind of...

HE IMITATES DUTCH SPEAKING

..the word "sloten" which means dykes or ditches

seemed to be exactly right for frogspawn and flax dams.

SHE SPEAKS IN DUTCH

I simply do not know what would happen to these poems

in Japanese or Chinese. I don't know what that means at all.

SHE SPEAKS JAPANESE

HE SPEAKS CHINESE

You can translate shapes, wisdom, intonation...

..it is better to translate than not to translate, obviously.

University was very important.

I don't think I would have become the writer I am,

maybe not a writer at all,

if I hadn't gone to university.

When I was at Queen's, I was your typical undergraduate.

I was doing a number of lectures, avoiding others,

but also interested in the literary side of things.

During the course of my years there, I wrote five or six poems that

were published in university magazines,

but I never, entirely, took myself seriously -

I called myself "incertus" - uncertain.

Which is what I was.

I'd been taught that modern poetry was ironical and urban

and so, I thought, "I don't really have anything much there."

But suddenly, I say, via Kavanagh, via Hughes, via contemporary

Irish poetry I thought,

"Hey, this material, on my own from County Derry, is workable."

And, up comes Tractors...

HE CHUCKLES

..a poem about tractors. That was the first poem that was published

in a public...forum.

It was accepted by the Belfast Telegraph in November -

very important to me.

I remember one line in it, which I liked at the time,

that the tractors gargled "sadly across furrows".

I really can't remember much else about it,

except that it had purchase, you know.

Your writing poems and...

sometimes the language is skidding over the surface, it is

catching something, but it doesn't have real haulage work.

And I felt that some of the lines in Tractors was doing haulage work,

it was hauling up, not just image but something out of the

bottom of myself, out of the nervous system, out of the

sensual, sensuous retainer system that's in your memory

and in your body.

-ANNOUNCER:

-The bodies were found in the townland of Altnamachin

and they have now been removed by army helicopter to a hospital morgue.

RUC forensic experts have been at the scene all morning

trying to put together a picture of the crime.

They believe that both men were shot where the bodies were found.

One lying on a grass verge by the roadside

and the second man about 40 yards away.

Death was caused in the first case by gunshot wounds to the head

and back and in the second, by gunshot wounds to the back only.

It's believed that both men were Catholics and that they were

returning from the AllIreland semifinal between

Dublin and Derry when they were picked up by their killers.

How do you write about somebody who was the victim of

a random sectarian killing?

What blazed ahead of you?

A faked roadblock?

The red lamp swung

And sudden brakes and stalling engine

Voices, heads hooded and the cold-nosed gun.

Colum McCartney, second cousin, a non-political fellow.

Someone whom I didn't know personally, at all,

really, but I knew who he was, where he was from.

Or in your driving mirror

Tailing headlights that pulled out suddenly and flagged you down

Where you weren't known and far from what you knew

The lowland clays and waters of Lough Beg

Church Island spire

Its soft tree line of yew.

That poem in memory of him started with a memory of Dante,

on Easter Sunday morning

walking along with Virgil after coming out of Hell mouth

along this little lake.

A little lake with mist, reeds, a very benign dawn-like atmosphere

and it reminded me of...where Colum McCartney grew up near Lough Beg.

So I more or less transposed a vision of myself and McCartney

walking along that strand.

I turn because the sweeping of your feet has stopped behind me

To find you on your knees with blood and roadside muck

In your hair and eyes

Then kneel in front of you in brimming grass

And gather up cold handfuls of the dew

To wash you, cousin.

There's a kind of beauty, I hope, about the ending.

The dead person is resurrected in a benign landscape,

which is classical elegy.

I dab you clean with moss fine as the drizzle out of a low cloud

I lift you under the arms and lay you flat

With rushes that shoot green again

I plait green scapulars

To wear over your shroud.

The two parts that are always operating in poetry

is the entrancement part where you let yourself go

and you do that elegy and then the self-critical part.

And in Station Island, Colum McCartney came back to ask,

"Why did you not make it a dirty deed?

"Why did you make it a beautiful story?"

That Protestant who shot me through the head

I accuse directly

But indirectly, you

Who now atone perhaps upon this bed for the way you whitewashed ugliness

And drew the lovely blinds of the Purgatorio

And saccharined my death with morning dew.

The decision that we made to go to Glanmore in Wicklow in 1972

was unexpected and out of an opportunity.

I was going to stop teaching in Queen's.

We were looking for a house in County Derry, County Tyrone,

maybe even County Down.

Driving around in the evenings...

when we got this note from Ann saying there's a house

in County Wicklow. We went down to County Wicklow at Easter in '72.

We decided there and then, "We'll go to this place." All of a sudden

we had made a decision to move from Belfast to Wicklow.

There was a story on the front page of The Irish Press -

"Heaney Moves South".

Then there was an editorial in The Irish Times...

It was mythologized, you know, from the start...

So...in a sense I wasn't just dealing with my own life,

I was dealing with the Borges And I factor,

the textual creature who was living a life

separate from you in the newsprint.

That was the time when I felt that I committed myself to poetry and

allowed myself to be called "poet".

I remember going down with the two children at the beginning of the

'73-'74 year. I went down to school with the two boys to enrol them

and Master Whelan wrote in the roll book -

occupation of parent or whatever - he wrote "file". He didn't ask me.

And I remember thinking, "Well... OK, I can live with that now,

"because I don't have any other job."

To me, it's a very large word - poet.

And, er, to think of yourself, to allow yourself to be called poet...

..is to...

..consecrate yourself.

HE LAUGHS

And...

I think it's very serious, actually, that's all.

It wasn't that I wasn't serious before,

I was a probationer, if you like,

or a deacon!

These are rather grand terms but I'm talking about, about something that

really happened, you know.

I never regretted moving.

I had, of course, complications,

but I never felt that was the wrong thing to do, never.

Because I went straight into a confident writing life.

Into a new energy.

I never left the North as a subject, I mean, it was in me,

I was already, what...? 33 when I moved. It was in me.

It was the subject and it continued.

I mean, if you think what was going on from 1972 -

January was Bloody Sunday but plenty

happened between '72 and '79 and '82 and then 1990

was one of the most brutal years ever.

As a writer, I felt, it had become, for me...

if you like, a cliche. The situation was stalemate

and cancerous. It was noxious, malignant.

And not moving. And when I got through

into the poems of Seeing Things...

in 1989, that was...

I kind of kicked my heels, got shot of the burden of...

the civic responsibility, if you like, and returned to lyric

carry-on or lyric...

not nonchalance...

yeah, insouciance.

I mean, really that's the best situation for writing lyric poetry.

Insouciance.

A rowan like a lipsticked girl

Between the by-road and the main road

Alder trees at a wet and dripping distance

Stand off among the rushes

There are the mud-flowers of dialect

And the immortelles of perfect pitch

And that moment when the bird sings very close

To the music of what happens.

BIRDSONG

NEWS THEME

-ANNOUNCER:

-Seamus Heaney wins this year's Nobel Prize for Literature.

Good evening. "For works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth..."

With those words of citation the poet Seamus Heaney

was today named as the winner of this year's

Nobel Prize for Literature.

-REPORTER:

-At the Heaney household in Dublin it's been a hectic day.

The phone hasn't stopped since the fax from Stockholm

arrived after lunch

but Seamus Heaney's two youngest children still haven't

heard from Dad.

We were in Greece, for the first time, with friends,

and we hadn't spoken to the kids for a couple or three days.

I rang home, the phone was answered and Christopher said,

"Oh, Dad. Oh, Dad! We're so proud!" And I thought,

"What? What?!"

And he said, "Did you not know?"

I said, "No, what...?"

And he said, "You've won..." et cetera...

SHE SIGHS

And Marie was next door.

She said, "What's wrong?"

And I said to Christopher, "Well, you'd better tell your mother."

"Mum... Dad has won the Nobel Prize."

And I said, "Chris, are you sure it isn't a hoax?

"Are you sure it isn't one of our friends sending him up?"

He said, "Mum, there are camera crews at the door.

"I've been on radio, Catherine has been on radio, we are besieged.

"Come home!"

-REPORTER:

-It was the type of homecoming Seamus Heaney could never

in his wildest dreams have envisaged when he and his wife Marie

left for a walking tour in Greece last month.

I have to say, one of the biggest moments of my life was

looking out the window and seeing the red carpet, with John Bruton

who was the Taoiseach of the time and our three children

standing on it, it was lovely.

So, that's my Nobel memory, it's not the embarrassment to me

-that it is to Seamus!

-Doesn't embarrass me.

And, as I said at the interview, "He deserved it."

LAUGHTER

I repeat!

-ANNOUNCER:

-1,200 guests gathered to pay tribute to ten laureates.

Six American, a German, a Mexican, a Dutchman and Seamus Heaney.

Well, I'd been used to a certain amount of high procedure

in the academic world, you know.

I'd done Encaenia at Oxford as professor of poetry,

been at commencement days in Harvard, graduation days here and there,

and you wondered, "Would the Nobel ceremony be different?"

But, undoubtedly, it is the ceremony that rose to us on occasion.

In his speech,

the Swedish writer Osten Sjostrand linked Heaney's work to

that of another Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh,

who believed the local can articulate the universal,

that God is in the bits and pieces of every day.

We all admire your compelling images and rhythms.

I did feel very alone and very strange, really.

An element of "why me?" and "my God".

I'm happy to invite you to receive the prize from the hands

of His Majesty the King.

WIND MUSIC PLAYS

APPLAUSE

One of the great things about it was the family were there,

and I sort of feel at a death when you see a big family,

you think it's some sort of safety net, that so many people,

no-one's going to have to bear the brunt of that all that grief,

and I felt that very strongly.

I, alone, or you, alone, didn't have to bear the brunt of all this joy

because our family were there.

I never felt more strongly the value of the familial

thing as I did at that time.

It was an emotional time indeed.

It has been, but my family are fairly robust.

My son Michael said, "No blubbering now."

So...

But I did have, as they say,

eye contact them as I bowed towards the audience

and that was one of the happiest eye contacts I've had with my family...

ever.

I heard him once define it as being hit by a mostly benign avalanche...

and that's about true.

It is. It certainly is life-changing,

no matter how hard you try to resist it.

I have often said it's one of the few magic words left in the world.

It's waved over somebody and it's always cited.

When...

Joseph Brodsky, who I knew, Derek Walcott got the call,

so to speak, and I met them afterwards,

I myself had a sense of them going through the ceo draiochta as it were.

It was terrific to have known those creatures

because Brodsky continued his ragamuffin self,

not changed at all, and likewise Mr Walcott.

Of course people are bound to be upset, and there are certainly

other contenders for the prize in this country.

I think it was very difficult for a lot of writers. Yes, absolutely.

No doubt. You'd only be an idiot, a kind of lunatic,

to think that it wouldn't cause, you know...

distress, complication, rage, jealously, whatever.

But, in these cases, it's the way people conduct themselves...

is important.

And...

people conducted themselves, in my book, very well

given that they had a lot to handle.

And... So, that is really where my interest in it begins and ends.

This is a lottery amongst other things.

It's a committee decision.

And, you know, even though it's a magic word,

it isn't necessarily the last word on anything.

"All through that Sunday afternoon, a kite flew above Sunday.

"A tightened drumhead, a armful of blow chaff.

"I'd seen it grey and slippy in the making."

The dedications to the children were

because we both belong to the children.

The things that they were about, in Catherine's case,

that little stick that I had given her.

"Here's a Catherine Anne.

"A kite for Michael and Christopher."

It is a very serious poem. It's a grievous poem, in a way.

It was risky to write it, in a way, I felt.

I dedicated it to them, but it was remembering my own father.

The one extraordinary thing that he did for me

in childhood was fly a kite.

He wasn't inclined to fly kites. He wasn't...

rarely out playing, you know?

He had a playful sense of the world, but he was a country man and a farmer

and he didn't to go

and play with the children on the strand or on the beach,

or touch football or anything like that.

But the one extraordinary thing I remember was the kite,

and the kite is extraordinary in itself.

"But now it was far up like a small black lark.

"But now it dragged as if the bellied string were a wet rope

"hauled upon to lift a shoal.

"My friend says that the human soul is about the weight of a snipe."

It looked so limber and light up there, but there's a powerful pull.

There's a weight and it goes up, but it's hanging.

Gravity is in that string.

So, it's that sensation that I remembered...

..and it then became the long-tailed pull of grief.

The poem, where that come from I don't know,

but it's sunt lacrimae rerum, as Virgil says.

Our mortality involves weeping and you better ready yourself for it.

"Before the kite plunges down into the wood

"and this line goes useless, take it in your two hands, boys,

"and feel the strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief.

"You were born fit for it,

"standing here in front of me. And take the strain."

My attitude to death has eased considerably.

When I was a child, and even into my early teens,

the sense of the terror of judgment,

the sense of...heaven and hell, the right hand of God,

the left hand of God - depart, ye cursed, come, ye blessed -

that was very much in the mind and in the imagination.

That has mercifully disappeared.

What hasn't gone away is the sense of readiness to change, to go over.

I think all the great myths are consistent with what you need.

You need a sense of moving on, crossing something,

into the dark, fair enough, into the unknown.

The great mythical stories of the after world are stories which

stay with you and which ease you towards the end,

towards a destination and transition.