Within the first few weeks I lived in Belfast, I visited the
Linen Hall Library, which is beautiful and old and makes you feel that
creativity lives all around you and literature is alive and breathing and you,
too, are alive and breathing and creative. Seamus Heaney had died not a month
before and upstairs, at the top of the flight, was a memorial book. I felt the weight
of the moment—of course I want to write in a memorial book for any writer I had
ever heard of in the upper hall of a library I was enthralled with. I knew of
Seamus from his translation of Beowulf,
a book I hated in a class I found no purpose in during undergraduate school. I
can’t remember what I wrote—I’m sure it was neither impressive nor meaningful.
I didn’t know him.
I know him now.
Each time I teach English II, I teach through his entire Field Work collection with my students. We
start small with “Oysters”, and by the time we reach “Ugolino”, my students are
fiery and on my level in terms of general obsession for the Northern Irish
Troubles and for Seamus Heaney’s heartthrob for his people, for reconciliation,
and for the willingness of the divisive groups to listen to one another—if only
they would listen to one another.
They move from essential non-knowingness (like I did) to
being able to describe the man by his themes, his loves, and his heart. They
begin to understand his poetry (very hard for people in general) because they
can hear his voice and feel the pull of his motivations.
This is when my class starts to shift. We get political. We
get real. We talk through the difficulty of listening, of sorting through the hard
stuff when divisiveness and fake news surround us. We talk about how bad people
can be good, how good people can be bad, and how God is there, swimming around
in all of the midst of it, even when we might not even mean to invoke him.
Seamus Heaney loved his wife and he loved his country. He
speaks of wounds from their Troubles as though they were imminent and eternal
and yet, he spoke through his pain with hope. Together, we feel the pulse of
humanity and take that energy into our next two series before the semester’s
end.
Were he alive, were I able to meet him, to thank him, I am
not certain I could do so without a gush of hot tears, thankful for someone who
could create such beauty and such vulnerability and such accessibility and help
snotty teenagers learn to open their hearts and their ears to love and care and
feel compassion for a situation they could care nothing for beforehand, since
they had no heart in the game.
You made them care. You draw us, one another, in and help us
to hear in a way we couldn’t before.
Dear Seamus, you planted goodness and hope where we could
only see blood, see walls, see bombs. You helped us dream toward a better
tomorrow, of white-washed rooms with elbow room, of the smell of saltwater inthe air, and of young women with baskets of green cabbage, new potatoes, andfresh carrots with mould still on the tops of them.
