Requiem for Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney, who has died aged 74, was a master of perfectly controlled and physically alive poetry, says Sameer Rahim.

Seamus Heaney in 2009 Photo: MARTIN POPE

By Sameer Rahim

The Telegraph - 30 Aug 2013

In January, I heard Seamus Heaney reading at the Tricycle Theatre in north London. At the time it felt like a special event – and with the news that the Nobel Prize-winning poet has died aged 74, I feel even more privileged to have been there. He read from his poem “Two Lorries” – "one of the least romantic titles for a poem ever”, he drily noted – which opens with a memory of his mother having coal delivered: “It’s raining on black coal and warm wet ashes.” The last two words echoed a passage from Joyce’s Ulysses he had read out earlier, in which Stephen Dedalus’s dead mother appears in a dream smelling of “wetted ashes”. 

Heaney's echo was surely deliberate. It felt like he was allowing us a private glimpse of his creative method.

As with most schoolchildren, I first studied Heaney in English classes. We all read “Digging” and diligently analysed its central metaphor about a pen being to a writer what a spade is to a farmer. It must have been the first time I recognised a metaphor. We earnestly debated animal cruelty after reading “The Early Purges”. Heaney slightly regretted that he was taught more for his message than his language. “If I have any doubts,” he told me when I interviewed him in 2009, “it’s the trimness with which the poems are taught sometimes.” But you could not help being drawn into his perfectly controlled and physically alive verse. “Death of a Naturalist” was terrifying: “Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked / On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails.”

Heaney’s work was not all ploughs and flax-dams. “Oysters” describes his lusty appetite for shellfish: “Our shells clacked on the plates. / My tongue was a filling estuary / My palate hung with starlight.” Once consumed, though, the poet thinks about who harvested the oysters and feels guilty at this “Glut of privilege”. The farm lad had come a long way, but he could never escape his roots. 
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