Language That Can Still Knock Language Sideways

A lesser artist, doing her own version of digging in the artist's country.

This lesser artist, doing her own version of digging in the master’s country.

I am writing this upon reading the headline that my first literary inspiration has passed away from this earth. It seems too soon. He had more to write. We all do- even though we are all expected to die at any given moment.

As a self-centered college student taking up space in 1990s Dublin, I remember purchasing the hard cover edition of Seamus Heaney’s Opened Ground– a selection of poems spanning 1966 to 1996. The cost took up a large chunk of my care and feeding money for the week, but since I was working my way through college at a nearby cafe, I figured that the shortfall would somehow take care of itself. Besides, when you’re an idealistic co-ed, sacrificing your salary in the name of art is one of life’s most noble practices. Subsisting on a diet of beans and toast never cost that much, anyway.

It was around this time too that Ted Hughes came out with his much-anticipated collection, Birthday Letters. He died shortly after the book’s publication, but during this period I remember reading both works with inspired greed as I felt surrounded by a world of contemporary literary giants who managed a direct feed into my impressionable ear.

In those days of nascent Internet, I used to purchase the newspaper and clip articles that I found of indescribable significance to my formation. One day while cruising the Sunday paper I was excited to discover a new poem penned by Heaney entitled, “A New Work in the English Tongue”. He wrote it after reading Birthday Letters, and I remember cutting out the poem and slipping it into my copy of Opened Ground. I loved this poem because it was as though I had been given a window into how the Nobel laureate digested a particular piece of literary work. To an aspiring writer, this was like gold to me.

You might have no use for poetry, but all of his collections have held sacred value long after I’ve graduated from the storied halls of my Irish alma mater. It has been over fifteen years since that period of time, but to this day I can tell you that my copy of Opened Ground is the one tome enjoying prime real estate on my bedside table.

In my kitchen on the fridge there is also a faded printout of ‘The Yellow Bittern’, and I routinely pull it down for out-loud-reading whenever I feel the need for a creative charge. It’s a longer poem that I once heard Heaney read while in Dublin- and his words made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end as he spoke. His cadence and imagery- right from the first time that I discovered his poetry- cast a spell that made me realize that this was the world to which I belonged.

Inexplicably, the past week or so has seen the same handful of lines from “The Yellow Bittern” knocking around my head:

Your common birds do not concern me,
The blackbird, say, or the thrush or crane,
But the yellow bittern, my heartsome namesake
With my looks and locks, he’s the one I mourn.

I mourn Seamus Heaney’s passing, but his words and command of sound are gifts that I will simultaneously celebrate. I can think of no other humans of ‘celebrity’ in this world who have greater power to bring us to tears than those of the artistic variety. They may be strangers to us, the modest populace of consumers– but what they give to the world of themselves is something so selfless and so powerful that we cannot help but feel moved when they leave us.

In the spirit of “The Yellow Bittern” and a catalog of work too great to be listed here, I will be toasting the life of Seamus Heaney on this day. He has made me believe in the solemn importance of the artist, the writer, and the poet. And for this unassuming woman who still seems to live in her college-aged girl’s mind, he will always be remembered as the artist who first made realize what I must do with my life.

Should we all be so lucky to speak of ourselves as Seamus Heaney could.