Seamus Heaney, Nobel prize winning poet has died earlier today at the age of 74. I loved his work describing the Irish troubles, showing the sadness of the violence and hatred with incredible grace. I will miss the prospect of reading something recent from him dearly. One of my favorites of his work is (how appropriate) Funeral Rites. I I shouldered a kind of manhood stepping in to lift the coffins of dead relations. They had been laid out in tainted rooms, their eyelids glistening, their dough-white hands shackled in rosary beads. Their puffed knuckles had unwrinkled, the nails were darkened, the wrists obediently sloped. The dulse-brown shroud, the quilted satin cribs: I knelt courteously admiting it all as wax melted down and veined the candles, the flames hovering to the women hovering behind me. And always, in a corner, the coffin lid, its nail-heads dressed with little gleaming crosses. Dear soapstone masks, kissing their igloo brows had to suffice before the nails were sunk and the black glacier of each funeral pushed away. II Now as news comes in of each neighbourly murder we pine for ceremony, customary rhythms: the temperate footsteps of a cortège, winding past each blinded home. I would restore the great chambers of Boyne, prepare a sepulchre under the cupmarked stones. Out of side-streets and bye-roads purring family cars nose into line, the whole country tunes to the muffled drumming of ten thousand engines. Somnambulant women, left behind, move through emptied kitchens imagining our slow triumph towards the mounds. Quiet as a serpent in its grassy boulevard the procession drags its tail out of the Gap of the North as its head already enters the megalithic doorway. III When they have put the stone back in its mouth we will drive north again past Strang and Carling fjords the cud of memory allayed for once, arbitration of the feud placated, imagining those under the hill disposed like Gunnar who lay beautiful inside his burial mound, though dead by violence and unavenged. men said that he was chanting verses about honour and that four lights burned in corners of the chamber: which opened then, as he turned with a joyful face to look at the moon.
Posted on: Fri, 30 Aug 2013 11:05:50 +0000
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