Feeling into words

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10288645/Seamus-Heaney-putting-feelings-into-words.html

“His long and productive journey continued through half a century, with countless triumphs of language and sensibility, always compressed and brilliant, like a horseshoe hammered out on the anvil of his writing desk and dipped in water: an image given shape in “The Forge”, his fond recollection of an old blacksmith. The collected poems constitute a diverse body of work that calls to the ear and lightens the spirit, asking one to take seriously the work of poetry, which is to listen to “the music of what happens”. Poetry became, for him, what he called “a search for images and symbols adequate to our predicament”.

Requiem for the Croppies
Written in 1966, on the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising. Printed in Door into The Dark, 1969.

“Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.

The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.

They buried us without shroud or coffin

And in August… the barley grew up out of our grave.”