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    Selected Poems 1988-2013
    Selected Poems 1988-2013
    Selected Poems 1988-2013
    Ebook236 pages2 hours

    Selected Poems 1988-2013

    By Seamus Heaney

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    About this ebook

    A new edition of the later selected work of a Nobel Prize-winning poet

    Often considered to be "the greatest poet of our age" (The Guardian), Seamus Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995 "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past." He saw poetry as a vocation and credited it with "the power to persuade the vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values." Paul Muldoon wrote that Heaney was "the only poet I can think of who was recognized worldwide as having moral as well as literary authority."
    Shortly before his death in 2013, Seamus Heaney began to compile Selected Poems 1988–2013, and although he was unable to complete the project, his choices have been followed here. This volume encapsulates the finest work from Seeing Things (1991) with its lines of loss and revelation; The Spirit Level (1996) where we experience "the poem as ploughshare that turns time / Up and over."; the landmark translation of Beowulf (1999); Electric Light (2001), a book of origins and oracles; and his final collections, District and Circle (2006) and Human Chain (2010), which limn the interconnectedness of being, our lifelines to our inherited past.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateNov 18, 2014
    ISBN9780374713997
    Selected Poems 1988-2013
    Author

    Seamus Heaney

    Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. His poems, plays, translations, and essays include Opened Ground, Electric Light, Beowulf, The Spirit Level, District and Circle, and Finders Keepers. Robert Lowell praised Heaney as the "most important Irish poet since Yeats."

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      Book preview

      Selected Poems 1988-2013 - Seamus Heaney

      The Golden Bough

      from Virgil, Aeneid, VI

      Aeneas was praying and holding on to the altar

      When the prophetess started to speak: ‘Blood relation of gods,

      Trojan, son of Anchises, the way down to Avernus is easy.

      Day and night black Pluto’s door stands open.

      But to retrace your steps and get back to upper air,

      This is the real task and the real undertaking.

      A few have been able to do it, sons of the gods

      Favoured by Jupiter Justus, or exalted to heaven

      In a blaze of heroic glory. Forests spread half-way down

      And Cocytus winds through the dark, licking its banks.

      Still, if love torments you so much and you so much desire

      To sail the Stygian lake twice and twice to inspect

      The underworld dark, if you must go beyond what’s permitted,

      Understand what you must do beforehand.

      Hidden in the thick of a tree is a bough made of gold

      And its leaves and pliable twigs are made of it too.

      It is sacred to underworld Juno, who is its patron,

      And overtopped by a grove where deep shadows mass

      Along far wooded valleys. No one is ever permitted

      To go down into earth’s hidden places unless he has first

      Plucked this golden-fledged tree-branch out of its tree

      And bestowed it on fair Proserpina, to whom it belongs

      By decree, her own special gift. And when it is plucked

      A second one grows in its place, golden once more,

      And the foliage growing upon it glimmers the same.

      Therefore look up and search deep and when you have found it

      Take hold of it boldly and duly. If fate has called you

      The bough will come away easily, of its own sweet accord.

      Otherwise, no matter how much strength you muster, you won’t

      Ever manage to quell it or fell it with the toughest of blades.’

      Markings

      I

      We marked the pitch: four jackets for four goalposts,

      That was all. The corners and the squares

      Were there like longitude and latitude

      Under the bumpy ground, to be

      Agreed about or disagreed about

      When the time came. And then we picked the teams

      And crossed the line our called names drew between us.

      Youngsters shouting their heads off in a field

      As the light died and they kept on playing

      Because by then they were playing in their heads

      And the actual kicked ball came to them

      Like a dream heaviness, and their own hard

      Breathing in the dark and skids on grass

      Sounded like effort in another world …

      It was quick and constant, a game that never need

      Be played out. Some limit had been passed,

      There was fleetness, furtherance, untiredness

      In time that was extra, unforeseen and free.

      II

      You also loved lines pegged out in the garden,

      The spade nicking the first straight edge along

      The tight white string. Or string stretched perfectly

      To make the outline of a house foundation,

      Pale timber battens set at right angles

      For every corner, each freshly sawn new board

      Spick and span in the oddly passive grass.

      Or the imaginary line straight down

      A field of grazing, to be ploughed open

      From the rod stuck in one headrig to the rod

      Stuck in the other.

      III

                      All these things entered you

      As if they were both the door and what came through it.

      They marked the spot, marked time and held it open.

      A mower parted the bronze sea of corn.

      A windlass hauled the centre out of water.

      Two men with a cross-cut kept it swimming

      Into a felled beech backwards and forwards

      So that they seemed to row the steady earth.

      Man and Boy

      I

      ‘Catch the old one first,’

      (My father’s joke was also old, and heavy

      And predictable). ‘Then the young ones

      Will all follow, and Bob’s your uncle.’

      On slow bright river evenings, the sweet time

      Made him afraid we’d take too much for granted

      And so our spirits must be lightly checked.

      Blessed be down-to-earth! Blessed be highs!

      Blessed be the detachment of dumb love

      In that broad-backed, low-set man

      Who feared debt all his life, but now and then

      Could make a splash like the salmon he said was

      ‘As big as a wee pork pig by the sound of it’.

      II

      In earshot of the pool where the salmon jumped

      Back through its own unheard concentric soundwaves

      A mower leans forever on his scythe.

      He has mown himself to the centre of the field

      And stands in a final perfect ring

      Of sunlit stubble.

      ‘Go and tell your father,’ the mower says

      (He said it to my father who told me),

      ‘I have it mowed as clean as a new sixpence.’

      My father is a barefoot boy with news,

      Running at eye-level with weeds and stooks

      On the afternoon of his own father’s

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