Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are turning
our attention to a figure who occupies a very
strange, almost paradoxical space in modern history.
We're talking about a man who spent his life
dealing with, you know, the most solitary, quiet,
and introspective of crafts writing poetry, but
who somehow ended up with the kind of visibility
and, well, public adoration that we usually associate
with pop culture icons. It is a paradox, isn't
it? I mean, usually when we talk about famous
poets in the 20th or 21st century, we mean famous
within the academy. Right. Famous to people who
have master's degrees in English. Exactly. Right.
But today we're talking about Seamus Heaney,
and he was famous in a way that just spilled
over the edges of the literary world entirely.
That's actually where I want to start. One of
the things that really struck me when we were
preparing for this is this specific term that
popped up in the 90s. Heaneyboppers. Heaneyboppers.
It's brilliant. Just the sound of it. It sounds
like a joke, but it wasn't. It was a real phenomenon.
You had these readings, specifically around the
time he was teaching at Oxford, where people
were queuing around the block. That's true. And
it wasn't just, you know, dutiful students with
notepads. It was fans. They were clamoring to
get into these lecture halls just to hear him
read verse. That image of a poet generating that
kind of electric excitement, it feels like a
glitch in The Matrix. It does, but it speaks
to the... specific magnetism he had. I mean,
by the time he died in 2013, he was widely considered
the most famous poet in the world. Without question.
But the danger with that kind of celebrity, especially
for a writer, is that the image can eclipse the
work. He becomes the lovable Irish bard with
the shock of white hair. And people forget the
sheer intellectual steel and the complexity involved
in getting there. Right. And that's the mission
for this deep dive. We aren't just here to celebrate
the famous guy. We want to understand the mechanics
of that journey, because on paper, this just
doesn't make sense. Not at all. He was born in
1939, the son of a cattle dealer in County Derry.
He grew up in a house with no electricity. He
was destined, statistically speaking, to be a
farmer or a tradesman. Absolutely. The trajectory
from a farm in Castle Dawson to the podium in
Stockholm accepting the Nobel Prize is not a
straight line. It is a path full of fractures,
political violence and intense personal negotiation.
And negotiation seems to be the key word. He
wasn't just negotiating his own career. He was
negotiating a war zone. He was writing during
the troubles in Northern Ireland. He was constantly
being pulled by different factions. Speak for
us. Denounce them. Take a side. And that is the
crucible. How do you remain an artist when your
community is demanding you become a propagandist?
That's really the central tension of his life.
It has to be. But what I love about digging into
Heaney is that despite all this heavy political
weight, the man himself, the personality, remained
incredibly grounded. We have sources that talk
about how he called the Nobel Prize the end thing
to avoid sounding arrogant. The end thing, which
is such a specific kind of humility. It's not
false modesty. It's almost like a protective
mechanism. It is. It's about keeping it real,
keeping it manageable in his own head. But let's
rewind. Let's go back to the soil, literally.
To understand the poet, we have to understand
where he stood. We have to go to Mossbond. That
was the name of the family farmhouse in County
Londonderry. He was born there in 1939, the first
of nine children. The first of nine. Wow. And
Mossbond isn't just a location. In Heaney's work,
it's almost a mythical landscape. He called it
his omphalos, the navel of the world. Everything
started there. And that world was defined by
his parents. But looking at the background here,
it seems like his mother and father weren't just
two different people. They represented two completely
different cultures, almost two different timelines
coexisting in one house. That is a crucial observation.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. If you
look at his father, Patrick Heaney, he is the
archetype of the old rural Gaelic world. The
cattle dealer. The cattle dealer. He was a man
of silence. Heaney writes about his father not
really speaking, but communicating through presence,
through the handling of animals, through the
rhythm of the seasons. He was deeply connected
to the earth. And then there's the mother, Margaret
Kathleen McCann. She wasn't from the farm originally.
No, and that's the clash. Her family, the McCanns,
were from the linen mill country. They were industrialized.
To Heaney, his mother represented the modern
world. She represented speech. She was articulate.
She was anxious. She was connected to the busyness
of the town and the mill. So you have the father
representing silence, nature, and the past, and
the mother representing speech, industry, and
the present. Exactly. And Heaney is the product
of that collision. He famously said that his
poetry came from the tension between his father's
silence and his mother's speech. He was constantly
trying to bridge those two worlds. Which explains
so much about his style. It does. It's why his
poetry is so physical. It's the mud of the father,
but it's also so articulate and crafted. It has
the speech of the mother. It's almost like he
was genetically engineered to be a translator
between worlds. But it wasn't just a philosophical
childhood. There was a specific event, a tragedy,
that really ruptured that early innocence. I
think for many listeners, this might be the first
Heaney poem they ever encountered in school.
I'd bet on it. You're thinking of midterm break.
Yes. The context here is just brutal. Heaney
is 12 years old. He's just won a scholarship
to St. Columns College, which is a boarding school
in Derry. So he's already left the farm. He's
already in that process of being educated out
of his class, which is a lonely position to be
in. Incredibly lonely. But then in February 1953,
while he is away at school, his younger brother
Christopher is killed. Christopher was only four.
Four years old, hit by a car on the road near
their home. And Heaney has to come back from
school, this strange... educated boy to face
this raw rural tragedy. The poem Midterm Break
is so famous, but I think because it's often
taught in schools, we can sometimes gloss over
just how devastating the craftsmanship is. Oh,
absolutely. It's not a weeping, wailing poem.
No, and that's the power of it. It's clinical.
It's almost like a reporter's notebook. He describes
sitting in the sickbay at school, counting bells,
nulling classes to a close, waiting for his neighbors
to pick him up. The detachment is shilling. It
is. He describes the ambulance arrival. He describes
the old men shaking his hand and saying they're
sorry for his trouble. It's all very observed,
very detached. Until he goes into the room with
the coffin. Right. And even then, it's about
observation. He sees his father crying, which
is a shock because his father is this stoic cattle
dealer. But then he looks at the body of his
brother. He notes the poppy bruise on his left
temple. He notes that there are no gaudy scars.
because the bumper knocked him clear. It's that
refusal to look away from the detail, but the
ending, the math of the ending. It's what makes
the whole thing land. A four -foot box, a foot
for every year. It creates a silence. You read
that line, and there is nothing else to say.
Snaps the box shut. It shows that even at the
very beginning of his writing life, Heaney understood
that you don't generate emotion by telling people,
I was sad. You generate emotion by showing the
cold, hard facts of the loss. The measurement
of the coffin. That tragedy seems to hang over
a lot of his work, but midterm break is the one
that really punches you in the gut. Later on,
he wrote The Blackbird of Glanmore, which returns
to this, right? Yes, much later in his life.
He revisited that loss. In The Blackbird of Glanmore,
he connects the memory of his brother to a blackbird
he sees on his land in Wicklow. It's less raw,
perhaps, but it shows that the grief never really
leaves. It just changes shape. It becomes part
of the landscape of his mind. Exactly. So he
has this grief and he has this education. He's
moving further and further away from the cattle
-dealing life of his father. This brings us to
the central metaphor of his early career. I think
digging is probably the poem that defines his
mission statement. It is his manifesto. Without
a doubt. You have to imagine the anxiety he must
have felt. He comes from a line of men who worked
with their hands. His grandfather cut turf on
the bog. His father handled cattle. Real physical
labor. Right. And here is Seamus holding a pen,
reading Latin, studying literature. There was
a deep sense of almost betrayal. Is he betraying
his class? Is he betraying his masculinity? That's
a very real imposter syndrome. My dad is out
there sweating in the fields and I'm in here
trying to find a rhyme for flower. Exactly. And
in digging, he confronts that head on. He looks
out the window and sees his father digging in
the flower beds. And he remembers his grandfather
digging turf. He describes the sound, the nicking
and slicing, the clean rasping sound of the spade
sinking into the gravelly ground. He admires
the skill of it, the rhythm. But then he looks
at his own hand. He looks at the pen, and he
has this realization. He says, I've no spade
to follow men like them. He accepts that he cannot
do what they did. He isn't that man. But then
he pivots. Between my finger and my thumb. The
squat pen rests. I'll dig with it. And that is
the moment everything changes. He reframes writing
not as this airy -fairy high intellectual pursuit,
but as a form of digging. He's going to use the
pen to excavate. He's going to dig into the past,
dig into the culture, dig into the memory. Just
like his father dug into the soil, it validates
his art as labor. It's such a powerful way to
bridge that gap. He's telling himself and his
family, I'm still working. I'm just working a
different seam. And that metaphor of digging,
of going down, of unearthing, it becomes the
method for his entire career. He is an archaeologist
of the South and of Ireland. So he commits to
the pen. He heads to Queen's University, Belfast
in 1957. This is the late 50s, early 60s. What
was the atmosphere like for a young poet there?
I assume the syllabus was very English. Incredibly
English. You study the canon, Shakespeare, Milton,
Wordsworth, Keats. And for a young Irish Catholic
from a rural background, there was this subtle.
pervasive message that real literature happened
elsewhere. It happened in London or the Lake
District. It didn't happen in County Derry. Your
local life, the barns, the bogs, the dialect,
that wasn't poetic. That was just backward. So
how did he break out of that? How did he realize
that his own life was worth writing about? It
didn't happen in a vacuum. He was reading widely,
of course. But the spark, funnily enough, came
from a British poet, Ted Hughes. Ted Hughes,
who wrote The Iron Man and was married to Sylvia
Plath. That's the one. Heaney read a collection
by Hughes called Lupercal. And Hughes was writing
about the countryside, but not in a polite, pastoral
way. He was writing about the violence of nature,
the mud, the blood, the raw vitality of animals.
It wasn't daffodils dancing in the breeze. No,
it was pikes in a pond eating each other. It
was a hawk tearing his prey apart. And Heaney
read this and said, wait a minute, this sounds
like my life. He realized that his own local
county dairy experience, which he thought was
unliterary, was actually a goldmine. He said
reading Hughes was like hearing his own voice
being validated. It gave him permission. That's
a massive confidence hurdle to clear, to realize
that your boring background is actually art.
It is. And he wasn't doing it alone. This is
where we have to talk about the Belfast group.
This sounds like a band, but it was a workshop,
right? It was a writer's group. Yeah. Organized
by a man named Philip Hobsbawm in 1963. Hobsbawm
was a lecturer at Queens and he brought together
these young writers, Heaney, Derek Mahon, Michael
Longley. They would meet, drink coffee and probably
other things and critique each other's work.
Having that peer group must have been essential.
Iron sharpening iron. Crucial. Yeah. They pushed
each other. They were competitive, sure, but
they were also a support network. They were,
in effect, defining a new Northern Irish poetry.
And Heaney also had a mentor figure, Michael
McLaverty. He did. McLaverty was a headmaster
at the school where Heaney taught for a bit,
St. Thomas' Secondary School. Right. And McLaverty
was an established writer himself. a novelist.
He took Heaney under his wing. He introduced
him to the poetry of Patrick Cavanaugh. Now,
Cavanaugh is important because he was an Irish
rural poet who wrote about the grim realities
of farming, the bachelor farmers, the stony gray
soil. McLaverty basically told Heaney, look at
Cavanaugh, you can do this. Your world is valid.
So he has the permission from Hughes, he has
the peers in the Belfast group, and he has the
mentor in McLaverty. The pieces are all falling
into place. They are. He starts publishing. he
gets married to Marie Devlin in 1965, who was
a writer herself, right? She was. She published
a collection of Irish myths called Over Nine
Waves. So he was marrying into an intellectual
equal, someone who understood the craft. Absolutely.
And then in 1966, the big one. Death of a Naturalist
comes out. This is his first major collection
with Faber and Faber, which was and is the most
prestigious poetry publisher in the UK. And it
lands with a splash. It was an immediate success.
It won the Gregory Award, the Jeffrey Faber Prize.
Critics loves it. But what they loved was that
it felt real. This brings us to the concept of
naturalism. Yeah, let's pause there. We use these
terms like naturalism and romanticism. Can we
break that down? If you're a listener who hasn't
touched a poetry textbook in 20 years, what's
the difference? Okay, broadly speaking, romanticism
think, Wordsworth or Keats often looks at nature
as a source of beauty, spiritual renewal, or
sublime awe. Nature is a place you go to feel
good or to feel God. It's idealized. In a way,
yes. Naturalism, on the other hand, looks at
nature as a physical system. It includes the
rot, the decay, the slime, the biological processes.
It doesn't try to make it pretty. So romanticism
is the sunset over the mountains. Naturalism
is the maggot and the dead sheep. Vivid, but
yes. That's a very good way of putting it. And
Heaney's Death of a Naturalist is full of that
stuff. He writes about soggy pee, potato mold,
frog spawn. He writes about the childhood realization
that nature isn't just cute animals, it's threatening
and gross and alive. There's that famous title
poem, Death of a Naturalist, where the frogs
essentially turn on him. He loves collecting
the frog spawn, but then the adult frogs come
back. They gather in the flax dam, like mud grenades.
He describes them as gross -bellied. Their slack
throats pulsed like sails. It's terrifying. It
is. It's the loss of childhood innocence through
the encounter with the gross biological reality
of the world. And critics found this incredibly
refreshing because it felt honest. It smelled
of the earth. So he's established. He's the country
poet. He's the guy who writes about digging frogs.
But the world around him is changing. We are
moving into the late 60s. This little rights
movement is starting in Northern Ireland. The
tension is building. And this is where the story
gets darker. The troubles didn't just happen
in the background. They tore through the fabric
of the society Heaney was living in. You couldn't
ignore it. For our listeners who might need a
quick refresher, the Troubles were a 30 -year
conflict in Northern Ireland. Roughly speaking,
you had the Unionists, who were mostly Protestant
and wanted to remain in the UK, and the Nationalists,
who were Republicans, mostly Catholic, who wanted
a united Ireland. And it got incredibly violent.
Car bombs, assassinations, checkpoints, hunger
strikes. It was a low -level civil war. And Heaney
was a prominent Catholic from Derry. The pressure
on him was immense. From both sides. From all
sides. Yeah. His community, the nationalist community,
expected him to speak for them, to use his platform
to denounce British oppression. But on the other
side, if he spoke too stridently, he'd be written
off as a propagandist for the IRA by the British
media and the unionist community? Exactly. He
was walking a tightrope. He was accused by some
Republicans of being an apologist or too passive
because he didn't write explicit up the rebels
poetry. Right. But he was also viewed with suspicion
by the British establishment. He had that quote
about permitting the situation. What did he mean
by that? You don't have to love it. You just
have to permit it. He meant you have to allow
the reality of the violence to enter your consciousness
in your work. You can't pretend it isn't happening.
But he refused to be a rabble rouser. There's
the example of Requiem for the Crappies. That
poem is a key moment in this whole dilemma. It
is a key moment. He wrote this poem in 1966 for
the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Rising. But
the poem is about the 1798 rebellion. It describes
the rebels, the crappies, fighting with pikes
against the British cannons. And it ends with
that incredibly powerful image. Yes. The rebels
were carrying barley in their pockets for food.
And when they were buried in mass graves, the
barley grew up out of the ground. He ends the
poem with, and in August the barley grew up out
of the grave. It's a powerful image of resilience.
The people die, but the resistance grows back.
It's easy to see how that could be taken as a
call to arms in 1966. And it was. But Heaney
read that poem to mixed audiences, Catholics
and Protestants. And he insisted that reading
it wasn't an incitement to violence. He called
it silence -breaking. Silence -breaking. He was
giving voice to a historical grief and a historical
resistance, but he wasn't telling people to go
out and plant a bomb today. That distinction
between silence -breaking and incitement is so
subtle, but it's everything. But eventually the
pressure became too much, or at least the environment
became too stifling. In 1972, he moved. He moved
his family south to Wicklow in the Republic of
Ireland. He left the war zone to write full time.
Some people criticize this as running away. I
can imagine. But artistically, it was necessary.
And it led to his most controversial and perhaps
most brilliant collection, North, which came
out in 1975. This is where we get the bog poems.
And this is where the digging metaphor goes from
being about turf to being about, well, bodies.
It's a fascinating pivot. Heaney had been reading
a book by a Danish archaeologist named P .V.
Glob called The Bog People. It was full of these
incredible photographs of Iron Age bodies that
had been preserved in the peat bogs of Denmark.
Peat is an amazing preservative. It's anaerobic,
right? It tans the skin like leather. Yes. These
bodies look like they are sleeping. You can see
their eyelashes. But they weren't just people
who fell in. They were ritual sacrifices. They
were murdered. They were. They had their throats
cut or they were strangled. They were killed
by their tribes to appease the goddess of the
earth, usually during times of crisis or winter.
And Heaney looks at these 2 ,000 -year -old sacrificial
victims and sees Belfast. That is the leap of
genius. He sees a parallel between the tribal
violence of the Iron Age and the sectarian violence
of the 1970s. He looks at a poem like The Tollan
Man or The Grauball Man. He describes the violence
done to their bodies with incredible forensic
detail. Why make that connection? Is he saying
we haven't changed? Is it that bleak? In a way,
yes. He's suggesting that the violence in Northern
Ireland wasn't just about modern politics or
civil rights. He was tapping into a darker, deeper
current. He was suggesting that this is a recurring
human tragedy. The need for a tribe to have a
scapegoat. The need to sacrifice someone to...
the territory. That is deeply disturbing. It
takes the conflict out of the realm of politics
that can be solved and into the realm of ritual
that just repeats. It is disturbing and it was
controversial. The critic Ciaran Carson famously
called him the laureate of violence, a myth maker,
an anthropologist of ritual killing. Some people
accused him of mythologizing the violence, of
making it seem inevitable or beautiful rather
than a political problem that could be solved.
It's a heavy charge. It is. But Heaney was trying
to find a framework to understand the horror
without just shouting slogans. He was trying
to find a container for the blood. He was using
the distance of history 2 ,000 years to get close
to the trauma of the present. Chris Laisley.
But while he was doing this deep anthropological
work, he was also dealing with the day -to -day
politics of who he was. There's a lighter, sharper
moment in 1982 involving a poetry anthology.
Ah, yes. The Penguin Book of Contemporary British
Poetry. The editors, Blake Morrison and Andrew
Motion, included Heaney. Now, from their perspective,
this was an honor. You are one of the great poets
of these islands. Join the club. But Heaney is
an Irish nationalist. Being called British is
complicated. It's not just complicated. For him,
it's an erasure of his identity. It's a political
act. So he wrote a pamphlet called An Open Letter.
And in it, he wrote these famous lines. He advised
my passport's green. No glass of ours was ever
raised to toast the queen. It's such a polite
burn. It's so heeny. It is. It's witty. He's
not screaming. He even acknowledges in the poem
that he has British friends and that English
is his medium. But he draws a line in the sand.
He says, my constitutional status might be ambiguous,
but my cultural identity is not. It's him asserting
control over his own label. He refused the UK
poet lorry chip for the same reason later on.
He did. But he did it with grace. He wasn't anti
-British people. He was anti -imperial assumption.
He once said, I had lunch at the palace once
upon a time. He could navigate those worlds,
but he knew where he stood. So as we move into
the 80s and 90s, Heaney becomes this truly global
figure. He's teaching at Harvard. He's the professor
of poetry at Oxford. This is the era of the Heaney
Boppers. The fame really did reach a fever pitch.
He was straddling the Atlantic. He was a professor
at Harvard from 1981 to 2006. So he became a
major figure in American letters, too. He was
the voice of Ireland for the world. And that
culminates in 1995 with the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The biggest prize in literature. The one that
changes your life forever. I love the story of
how he found out because it's so on Hollywood.
It feels very true to his character. It's perfect.
He was in Greece on holiday with Marie. This
was before everyone had a smartphone in their
pocket. The Nobel Committee was frantically trying
to call him, but he was just away, out of touch.
I can just imagine the Swedish Academy sweating,
wondering if he's going to pick up the phone.
Eventually, a journalist tracks him down. He
lands at Dublin Airport two days later, and the
world is waiting. The media scrum is insane.
And his reaction is just so grounded. The citation
praised his works of lyrical beauty and ethical
depth. That's heavy stuff. But when asked how
he felt about joining the list of Irish winners,
Yates, Shaw, Beckett, he said, it's like being
a little foothill at the bottom of a mountain
range. A little foothill. That is serious humility.
It is. And privately, as we said, he called it
the end thing. Did you sort out the end thing?
It was a way of domesticating the glory. He didn't
want the prize to separate him from his friends
or his roots. He wanted to remain Seamus. He
was intensely aware of the danger of that kind
of thing. He didn't want it to buff him up. But
despite the foothill comment, The world didn't
see him that way. The critic Robert Lowell called
him the most important Irish poet since Yeats.
That is the crown. It is. And arguably, Heaney
was more beloved than Yeats. Yeats was aristocratic,
distant. He was the farmer's son. He was approachable.
You felt like you could have a pint with Seamus
Heaney. You wouldn't necessarily want a pint
with Yeats. He might cast a spell on you or talk
about fairies. That's exactly. So he wins the
Nobel. He's achieved everything a poet can possibly
achieve. You'd think he might relax. But in 1999,
he does something incredibly risky. And as it
turns out, incredibly popular. He publishes a
translation of Beowulf. Beowulf. The bane of
high school English students everywhere. An old
English epic about monsters and dragons. Not
exactly a page -turner for most people. Why did
he do it? And why did it become a bestseller?
I mean, it beat Harry Potter on the bestseller
list at one point? That's insane. The success
comes down to voice. Heaney realized that he
didn't have to write it in standard English.
He realized that the old English language, the
language of the Anglo -Saxons, had a taproot
that connected to the dialect he grew up with
in Ulster. How so? Can you give an example? Well,
in Northern Ireland, the English spoken there
is infused with Scots and Gaelic. Yeah. But it
also retains old archaic words that have died
out in standard British English. He gives the
example of the word thole. Thole. T -H -O -L
-E. Yes. It means to suffer, to endure. I couldn't
thole it. Heaney grew up hearing his aunt say
that. And he found that word in Beowulf. So he
realized that his own local voice was actually
the perfect instrument to translate this ancient
poem. So he translated Beowulf into Ulster English.
In a way, he used the cadence and the vocabulary
of his childhood. The very first word of the
poem in Old English is quite. Traditionally,
translators rendered this as hark or listen or
low. Very King James Bible. Very formal. Extremely
formal. He translated white as so. So just. So?
So. The Spear Danes in Days Gone By. It's conversational.
It sounds like a man in a pub in County Derry
slapping the table and starting a story. So let
me tell you this. Grab the reader immediately.
It took the poem out of the museum and put it
back in the mouth. That is a brilliant example
of what we talked about earlier, trusting his
own background. He didn't try to sound like an
Oxford Don. He sounded like a Heaney. Exactly.
He reclaimed the English language by showing
that his version of it was just as valid and
perhaps more powerful than the standard version.
This openness to language brings me to a detail
I absolutely love. We have the Nobel Prize winner,
the Oxford professor, the translator of Beowulf
talking about Eminem. Yes. Yeah. In 2003, it
was a wonderful moment. Heaney praised Eminem.
He said Eminem sent a voltage around a generation.
He was fascinated by the verbal energy. And you
can see why. Heaney wasn't a snob. He didn't
care if the words were in a leather -bound book
or a rap song. If the words had power, if they
had rhythm, if they had alliteration and assonance,
if they moved people, he respected it. Voltage
is a great word for it. It implies a physical
shock. And that's what Heaney always wanted poetry
to be. Not a puzzle to be solved, but a physical
experience. A shock to the system. We should
also mention his theater work. He wasn't just
a poet. No, he wrote adaptations of Greek tragedies.
The Cure at Troy? based on Sophocles' Philoctes,
is the most famous. It has that line about the
moment when hope and history rhyme. But in 2004,
he wrote The Burial of Thebes, which is an adaptation
of Sophocles' Antigone. And this wasn't just
an academic exercise either, was it? No, it was
2004, the Iraq War, the Bush administration.
Antigone is a play about a woman who defies the
state, King Creon, to bury her brother. It's
about the clash between personal conscience and
state power. And Heaney saw parallels. Clear
parallels between Creon's rigid, uncompromising
stance and the Bush -Blair rhetoric of you are
either with us or against us. He was using the
classics to comment on the present again, just
like he did with the bog poems. He never stopped
engaging with the world. But the world eventually
catches up with all of us. In 2006, he had a
major health scare. He did. He suffered a stroke.
He was in Donegal, staying with his friend, the
playwright Brian Friel. He woke up and couldn't
move his leg. He was rushed to the hospital.
And even in the ambulance, the wit was there.
Laughs. It's incredible. He recounts that when
the paramedics were attaching the heart monitor,
he looked at them and said, blessed are the pacemakers.
That is incredible. A pun on the Sermon on the
Mount while you're having a stroke. It just shows
his mind was still firing on all cylinders. But
the stroke shook him badly. He wrote about feeling
babyish, crying easily, feeling the fragility
of his body. It changed his work. His 2010 collection,
Human Chain, is very different from his earlier
stuff. How so? What's the shift? It's lighter.
It's airier. It's almost ghostly. The critic
Colm Toibin called it a book of shades and memories.
He writes about his parents again, but this time
it's about trying to help his father get up from
the bed or remembering the weight of his wife's
hand. It's a book about holding on to human connection
before you let go. Human chain. We are all linked.
Exactly. Hand to hand. It's a very tender, very
mortal book. Which brings us to the end. August
2013. Heaney is 74. He's recovered from the stroke.
He's still active, still traveling. He went for
dinner with Marie and a friend in Dublin. He
fell outside the restaurant. It seemed like a
minor fall, but he was taken to the Black Rock
Clinic for observation. And the next morning,
he was gone. A ruptured artery in his aorta.
It was sudden. And the reaction was just global
grief. The funeral was broadcast live on Irish
television. You had politicians like Bill Clinton,
rock stars like Bono, poets and farmers all mourning
him. But the thing that everyone remembers, the
thing that still gives me chills is the final
message. This is the moment that elevates his
story into something almost spiritual. Minutes
before he was taken to the operating theater,
minutes before he died, he sent a text message
to his wife, Marie. She wasn't in the room with
him. She was on her way or just outside. He was
alone for a moment, and he typed two words in
Latin. Noli timer. Noli timer. Be not afraid.
Why Latin and why that phrase? Well, the Latin
is the language of his education, the language
of the Catholic Church of his childhood, the
language of the classics. It was deep in his
hard drive. But the sentiment. Be not afraid.
It appears in the Bible when angels appear to
humans. It appears when Jesus walks on water.
It is the ultimate message of reassurance from
the beyond. It's devastatingly beautiful. He's
facing his own death, the terrifying unknown,
and his final act is to comfort his wife, to
tell her not to be afraid. It encapsulates his
entire character. He was a man of immense duty
and immense love. And he used his final breath
or his final thumbs to try to make it easier
for the person he loved. It also feels like a
message to us, to his readers. I think so. I
think it has to be. He spent his life looking
at the bog bodies, the violence, the gaudy scars,
the coffins. He didn't shy away from the darkness.
But his final conclusion wasn't despair. It was
courage. Nulli Tamir. That courage is literally
carved in stone now. We have to talk about his
epitaph. He's buried in belly, right? Why? Back
in the earth of County Derry, back where he started.
And the headstone bears a line from one of his
poems, The Gravel Walks. Walk on air against
your better judgment. I love this line. Walk
on air against your better judgment. It's so
optimistic, but also so realistic. Let's unpack
that. Better judgment is sensible. It's gravity.
It's logic. It's what keeps you safe. Better
judgment. is what tells you to keep your head
down, to not take risks, to stay on the ground.
But Heaney is telling us to defy that, to walk
on air, to allow ourselves to feel joy, to feel
uplift, to trust in art and the spirit, even
when the world tells us it's foolish. It connects
back to the Heaney Boppers, doesn't it? The excitement
he generated. He lifted poetry off the page and
made it walk on air for a while. He did. He proved
the poetry wasn't just for the classroom. It
was for life. It was a survival mechanism. He
believed it should be transformative, not just
a printout of reality. And his legacy is still
growing. The Seamus Heaney Homeplace in Belly
is a huge visitor center now. And there is a
new book coming in 2025. Yes. The poems of Seamus
Heaney. It's going to be the definitive collection,
including uncollected works. So we aren't done
learning from him yet. I think it's the perfect
place to land. We've gone from the boy at Moss
Bonn listening to the wind in the chimney to
the Nobel laureate telling the world, be not
afraid. It's a journey that shows the power of
paying attention. Heaney paid attention to the
small things, the spade, the pen, the blackbird.
And through them, he understood the world. He
made the local universal. So here is the takeaway
for you listening. We live in a world that is
loud, often violent, and full of better judgment
telling us to be cynical. It's very easy to be
cynical. It's the default setting. But Heaney
challenges us to dig deeper, to trust our own
voice, our own local experience, and ultimately
to walk on air. My challenge to you today, read
one Heaney poem. Don't analyze it for a grade.
Just read it. Read postscript. Read digging.
Read midterm break. Listen to the sound of it.
Let the voltage hit you. Exactly. And maybe for
a moment, you'll feel that reassurance, that
courage. No lead timer. Thanks for digging with
us today. We'll see you on the next deep dive.