Godspeed Seamus Heaney

Godspeed Seamus Heaney

Eulogy today ~ Seamus Heaney’s Beauty

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seamus_Heaney 

And from Whisky Fire ~ Hope for This Side of the Grave

I'd not known that Joe Biden was a Heaney fan; interesting, I guess

The news this morning that Irish poet Seamus Heaney had passed away at 74 is tremendously sad, not least because it means we’ve lost a poet who, in deciding to be politically engaged with Ireland’s drive towards self-determination, did precisely what artists have the power to do, and provided new insights into the struggle rather than simply repeating a party line. Today, I’m remembering in particular The Cure at Troy, Heaney’s retelling of Sophocles’ Philoctetes, the story of how Odysseus tricked Achilles’ son into joining the Greek forces at Troy towards the end of the Trojan War. The long work, particularly a couple of lines of it, is a particular favorite of Vice Presiden Joe Biden’s, and I heard him recite some of it the night he was inaugurated in 2009. He’s invoked it multiple times since, and while it’s a perfect invocation of both the sense of hope and hard work that was present when the administration came into office, it’s also a reminder that one of the tasks of art is to help us manage pain, not simply to chronicle temporary euphoria.

~*~