Seamus Heaney: R.I.P.

The great Irish poet, Seamus Heaney, died yesterday.  R.I.P.

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995, Heaney's first book, The Death of a Naturalist, was published in 1965.

From the Glanmore Sonnets:

VIII

 

Thunderlight on the split logs: big raindrops   

At body heat and lush with omen

Spattering dark on the hatchet iron.

This morning when a magpie with jerky steps   

Inspected a horse asleep beside the wood   

I thought of dew on armour and carrion.

What would I meet, blood-boltered, on the road?   

How deep into the woodpile sat the toad?

What welters through this dark hush on the crops?   

Do you remember that pension in Les Landes   

Where the old one rocked and rocked and rocked   

A mongol in her lap, to little songs?   

Come to me quick, I am upstairs shaking.   

My all of you birchwood in lightning.

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