“The letters of this alphabet were trees”

I went on Thursday to a memorial celebration for Seamus Heaney, given by his friends and colleagues of the English Department here.  Readings, reminiscences, music (Messiaen, Janáček, a setting of “Kinship IV” by a young composer, Matthew Aucoin).  I was touched by the simplicity (no flowers, no bombast); by the young and old voices; by all the grey and white heads in the church; by the windows looking out on the embers of autumn in the rain.

And damn, that man could write!  Get him musing on the land or handtools or on alphabets and he’s unparalleled.  (That last poem was written for the ΦΒΚ Chapter here, and read by three undergraduates, stanzas in turn.)

I loved hearing the 9th-century originals of Beowulf and “Pangur Bán” with his translations.  The rain suited both.

I think my favorite anecdote was of Heaney as an impassioned young poet, going to look for Gerard Manley Hopkins’s grave in a Dublin cemetery.  There were of course two gravediggers.  The first:  “The Hopkins, is it?”  The second:  “That would be the convert.”

And Peter Sacks retold Heaney’s memory of being an altar boy, being given the priest’s biretta (a tricorn) to hold between finger and thumb, his awe and the heft of it mingling with a mischief:  he always wanted to “sail it into the sanctuary” like a little black bat.  Then Sacks read this:

Lightenings viii

The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise

Were all at prayers inside the oratory

A ship appeared above them in the air.



The anchor dragged along behind so deep

It hooked itself into the altar rails

And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,



A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope

And struggled to release it. But in vain.

'This man can't bear our life here and will drown,'



The abbot said, 'unless we help him.' So

They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back

Out of the marvellous as he had known it.
Copyright © Seamus Heaney
Nine