Quotes from Seamus Heaney

The hall towered, gold-shingled and gabled, and the guest slept in it until the black raven with raucous glee announced heaven's joy, and a hurry of brightness overran the shadows.

I trust contrariness. ... I simply rebelled at being commanded.

Nobody, Nobody can be sure they're always right. The ones who are fullest of themselves that way Are the emptiest vessels.

Happy the man...with a natural gift for practising the right one [art] from the start-- poetry, say, or fishing; whose nights are dreamless; whose deep-sunk panoramas rise and pass like daylight through the rod's eye or the nib's eye.

And here is love like a tinsmith's scoop sunk past its glean in the meal-bin. --"Sunlight

A landscape fossilized, It's stone-wall patternings Repeated before our eyes In the stone walls of Mayo. Before I turned to go He talked about persistence, A congruence of lives, How, stubbed and cleared of stones, His home accrued growth rings Of iron, flint and bronze - "Belderg

Did you ever hear tell,' said Jimmy Farrell, 'of the skulls they have in the city of Dublin? White skulls and black skulls and yellow skulls, and some with full teeth, and some haven't only but one,' and compounded history in the pan of 'an old Dane, maybe, was drowned in the Flood.' My words lick around cobbled quays, go hunting lightly as pampooties over the skull-capped ground. -Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces

I step through origins like a dog turning its memories of wilderness on the kitchen mat: the bog floor shakes, water cheeps and lisps as I walk down rushes and heather. I love this turf-face, it's black incisions, the cooped secrets of process and ritual: -"Kinship

Which would be better, what sticks or what falls through? Or does the choice itself create the value?

I composed habits for those acres so that my last look would be neither gluttonous nor starved. I was ready to go anywhere.

No windfall or good fortune comes to mortals That isn't paid for in the coin of pain.

Anything can happen, the tallest towers Be overturned, those in high places daunted, Those overlooked regarded.

This is the vowel of earth dreaming its root in flowers and snow, mutation of weathers and seasons, a windfall composing the floor it rots into. I grew out of all this like a weeping willow inclined to the appetites of gravity.

Was music once a proof of God's existence? As long as it admits things beyond measure, That supposition stands.

My poor scapegoat, I almost love you but would have cast, I know, the stones of silence. I am the artful voyeur of your brain's exposed and darkened combs, your muscles' webbing and all your numbered bones: I who have stood dumb when your betraying sisters, cauled in tar, wept by the railings, who would connive in civilized outrage yet understand the exact and tribal, intimate revenge. -"Punishment

Diodorus Siculus confessed His gradual ease among the likes of this: Murdered, forgotten, nameless, terrible Beheaded girl, outstaring axe And beatification, outstaring What had begun to feel like reverence. -"Strange Fruit

The diamond absolutes. I am neither internee nor informer; An inner emigre, grown long-haired And thoughtful; a wood-kerne Escaped from the massacre, Taking protective colouring From bole and bark, feeling Every wind that blows; Who, blowing up these sparks For their meagre heat, have missed The once-in-a-lifetime portent, The comet's pulsing tose.

I rhyme To see myself

Instead, in the morning, mangled and sleeping the sleep of the sword, they slopped and floated like the ocean's leavings.

But every now and then, just weighing in is what it must come down to, and without any self-exculpation or self-pity.

a baleful light, flame more than light, flared from his eyes.

here is a space again, the scone rising to the tick of two clocks. And here is love

The land of the living, sister, Is neither here nor there. We enter it and we leave it. The dead in the land of the dead Are the ones you'll be with longest.

War has an appetite For human goodness but it won't touch the bad.