/lit/ - Literature

I think Heaney is still trying to work through these issues - the first poem of Electric Light (OK, 10 years old, but still after the troubles were allegedly "over") has the lines

Where the checkpoint used to be
Where the rebel boy was hanged in '98
Where negative ions in the open air
Are poetry to me. As once before
The slime and silver of the fattened eel.

Heaney seems to be concerned that the political engagement he was almost forced to make has moved him away from the elegaic poet of nature he wanted to be or envisaged himself as. It's almost as if he saw himself as the heir to Hughes, rather than Yeats, and has been a victim of his own irishness and the times he grew up in. The Death of a Naturalist is a hymn to the poet he may have been, and the work he does now still addresses these issues

>>1505495
>>mfw I'll never be a tripfriend.

Don't know what mean, sorry. Brain broken. In return, Seamus Heaney:

When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.

So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives-
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

I really do fucking love sonnets, me.