Seamus Heaney: Quotations - Index
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Material on these pages comprises a commonplace record of the author’s best-known writings in prose and verse to be met in articles, reviews, and essays including a wide range of monographs, post-grad dissertations and student essays. The resultant compilation is a reader’s notebook and not an anthology or a publication of the poet’s works. Visitors to these pages are strongly encouraged to check original texts before quoting versions cited herein, as stated more generally in the “Terms & Conditions” of RICORSO. |
‘You have won renown: you are known to all men / far and near, now and forever. / Your sway is wide as the wind’s home, / as the sea around cliffs.’ (From Beowulf - quoted in by Petri Liukkonen in ‘Seamus Heaney’ at the Kirjasto website [online].) |
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‘In the light of the imagination’ - on Patrick Kavanagh, in (The Irish Times, 2004)
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“Open Letter” | | [...] | |
You’ll understand I draw the line At being robbed of what is mine, My patris, my deep design To be at home In my own place and dwell within Its proper name.’
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| Open Letter (Derry: Field Day Co. 1983), p.25-26. |
“Station Island”
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Let go, let fly, forget You’ve listened long enough Now strike your note ... |
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—Station Island (1984). |
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[Chorus:] Human beings suffer ... You would wonder if it’s meant..... What’s the sense of it? | | —The Cure at Troy (London: Faber 1990, p.13.) |
“The Cantonment of Expectation” | | What looks the strongest has outlived its term. The future lies with what’s affirmed from under. |
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[...] So now, as a thank-offering for one Whose long wait on the shaded bank has ended, I arrive with my bunch of stalks and silvered heads Like tapers that won’t dim As her earthlight breaks and we gather round Talking baby talk.
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—from The Human Chain (2010) |
“Loughanure” |
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[...]
IV Had I sufficient Irish in Rannafast In 1953 to understand The seanchas and dinnseanchas, Had not been too young and too shy, Had even heard the story about Caoilte Hunting the fawn from Tory to a door In a fairy hill where he wasn’t turned away But led to a crystal chair on the hill floor While a girl with golden ringlets harped and sang, Language and longing might have made a leap Up through that cloud-swabbed air, the horizon lightened And the far ‘Lake of the Yew Tree’ gleamed.
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—from Human Chain (2010). |
See also sundry extracts from Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (London: Faber & Faber 2008) [as attached]. |
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