Seamus Heaney- the Daddy Loves Him But Can't Say Why

Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
--Seamus Heaney
The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
--Seamus Heaney

Today, the daddy is thinking of Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet. You say, "daddy, of course you like Seamus Heaney because he's the Irish guy from a rural town in Northern Ireland who made it big. He wrote more than dozen volumes of poetry, penned numerous articles in literary criticism, performed numerous translations, and wrote two great plays “The Cure at Troy” (his version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes) and The Burial at Thebes (A version of Sophocles' Antigone) ." Great, but the daddy knows a lot of folks who made it and, frankly, he hates many of them (the arrogant ones). So that's not why the daddy likes him.

You say "Oh, please. The guy won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1995." Good for him, but the daddy is not impressed with individual titles. Maybe the daddy likes him because he writes poems that recall the days of simple life on a farm in Ireland, poems like “The Death of a Naturalist:”

Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam. I ducked through the hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose-necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
The clap and plops were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran.
The great slime Kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would catch it.

Or in “Blackberry Picking” where he writes of tasting that first blackberry late in August:

You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk can, pea tins, jam pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.

Maybe the daddy was an Irish dude in another life and was reincarnated as a black guy and set down in the center of a project in Atlanta, Georgia and now yearns for the simple life of a farm back in the ole country...Or, more likely, maybe the daddy, having grown up in projects in inner-cities, wishes he had the luxury of a more carefree childhood on a farm, playing with frogs in a stream in the back of his house or picking blueberries just up the hill in late August.

Writing with clarity

Maybe the daddy likes this guy because he writes poems with such clarity and specificity about the familiar, the routine, poems like this one where he distills the silent beauty of a woman (perhaps his wife or mother) as the sunlight shines down upon her as she prepares a meal:

“…and the sun stood
like a griddle cooling
against the wall

of each long afternoon.
So, her hands scuffled
over the bakeboard,
the reddening stove

sent its plaque of heat
against her where she stood
in a floury apron
by the window.

Now she dusts the board
with a goose’s wing
now sits, broad-lapped,
with white nails

and measling shins:
here is a space
again, the scone rising
to the tick of two clocks.

And here is love
like a tinsmith’s scoop
sunk past its gleam
in the meal-bin.

Something more spiritual

Maybe it's because his writing makes the daddy feels a special kinship to him and to Ireland, especially those poems in the book “North.” For some reason, the daddy keeps coming back to the poem “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing,” especially these lines:

Smoke signals are loud-mouthed with us:
Maneuverings to find out name and school,
Subtle discrimination by addresses
With hardly an exception to the rule.

That Norman, Ken and Sidney signaled Prod
And Seamus (call me Sean) was sure-fire Pape.
O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,
Of open minds as open as a trap,

Where tongues lie coiled, as under flames lie wicks,
When half of us, as in a wooden horse,
Were cabin’d and confined like wily Greeks,
Besieged with the siege, whispering morse.

So does the daddy love Heaney because he is a reincarnated Irishmen? Because, through Heaney, he can go into a time machine and go to a pond and play with frogs in his backyard?... or because, through Seamus, he can connect more closely to humanity, a humanity that reminds him that wherever there is oppression, there is a Northern Ireland?

Yes, the daddy loves Seamus, but he can't say why.

Ever loved a writer or a book but couldn't say why?