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Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Enda Kenny said Mr Heaney’s death "brings great sorrow to Ireland, to language and to literature".
He said: "Today, it would take Seamus Heaney himself to describe the depth of his loss to us as a nation. "He belongs with Joyce, Yeats, Shaw and Beckett in the pantheon of our greatest literary exponents."
My feelings exactly. He was an wonderful person who brought the entire country together through his poetry.
I have had this poem running through my head all day. This, I studied in school and can still recite from memory. Unfortunately, it's a very sad poem and based on tragedy in Heaney's own life.
Mid-Term Break
I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o'clock our neighbors drove me home.
In the porch I met my father crying--
He had always taken funerals in his stride--
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.
The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand
And tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble,'
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand
In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.
Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,
Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.
A four foot box, a foot for every year.
Seamus Heaney
He said: "Today, it would take Seamus Heaney himself to describe the depth of his loss to us as a nation. "He belongs with Joyce, Yeats, Shaw and Beckett in the pantheon of our greatest literary exponents."
My feelings exactly. He was an wonderful person who brought the entire country together through his poetry.
I have had this poem running through my head all day. This, I studied in school and can still recite from memory. Unfortunately, it's a very sad poem and based on tragedy in Heaney's own life.
Mid-Term Break
I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o'clock our neighbors drove me home.
In the porch I met my father crying--
He had always taken funerals in his stride--
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.
The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand
And tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble,'
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand
In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.
Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,
Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.
A four foot box, a foot for every year.
Seamus Heaney
Digging is one of my students' favorite poems...
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