By Brian Mendonça
When one looks at Irish literature the names of W. B Yeats
and M.M. Synge come to mind. Yeats is remembered for school favourites like the
poem, ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ and Synge for the chilling drama Riders to the Sea. Both these works have
a strong affinity to water.
Like the recent tragedies in Goa in which a brother and
sister lost their lives in the sea at Agonda, Canacona, Riders to the Sea is also about death. First performed in 1904, it
is a lament of a mother who loses all her sons to the sea. What is unique in
these works is the world-view which is Irish. The sea is a horse which claims
lives in Synge’s play. Yeats in ‘Prayer for My Daughter’ written for his
daughter born in 1919 in the aftermath of World War I, notes the ‘murderous
innocence of the sea.’
Another aspect of Irish literature is the Irish dialect
which finds its way into the works. This roots as well as distances the work
from its reader/public. I am drawn to Irish literature for the way it recalls
and memorializes Ireland and Irish history, its traditions, its convictions.
When Irish poet and Nobel laureate, Seamus Heaney passed on
last week, I wanted to assess his contribution to world poetry, but mostly to
Ireland. When I opened his collection The
Spirit Level which I had purchased for a throwaway price from the British
Library, Delhi (such is the fate of poets) I was struck by his description of
rain. As the rain bids adieu in Goa Heaney reminds us to listen to it for we
are indeed blessed to enter heaven ‘through the ear of a raindrop’ (‘The Rain
stick’).
In Heaney’s poem about a piper titled ‘Keeping Going’ I had
to scurry for the meanings of ‘sporran’ and ‘byre’. ‘Sporran’ is the leather
pouch worn by men with the traditional kilts/skirts of the Scottish Highlands.
‘Byre’ is the Old English word for ‘cowshed’. Both in form and content there is
a reverence in Heaney, for the past.
In ‘Digging’ he recalls the digging done by his father and
his grandfather and observes that though he does not dig the earth he will
‘dig’ with his pen.
Born in Northern Ireland Heaney was at the centre of the
strife between Belfast and London. A virtual civil war, the hatred in the ‘70’s
and 80’s was mired in religion, viz. Cathoiics versus Protestants.
Everything passes. ‘Noli
timere’ texted Heaney to his wife minutes before he died. In his beloved
Latin it meant ‘Do not be afraid.’
Members of the group U2 were there at the funeral.
Mary Burns read her poem for Heaney where he was laid on 8
September 2013:
We will cross worlds
not cross words . . .
So now you are
in a
beautiful field . . .
It may be clay
You
are back
From whence you came
Your feet in clay
Your words set in stone.*
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*www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk
Pix: Seamus Heaney (right) with Czeslaw Milosz http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2008/12/28/seeing_things/
Published in Gomantak Times Weekender, St. Inez, Goa on Sunday, 15 September 2013
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