“World Is Suddener Than We Fancy”: Seamus Heaney Dies at 74

At 74, after a short illness, the Irish poet and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney is dead. He is survived by his wife and three children, and by his plainspoken, incandescent body of work. “I like a touch of rough and readiness in the language,” he once told the Paris Review. “Something in words that makes you realize all over again what Louis MacNeice means when he says ‘world is suddener than we fancy.’”

In the long poem “From Station Island,” his famous lines:

Your obligation
is not discharged by any common rite.
What you must do must be done on your own

So get back in harness. The main thing is to write
for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust
that imagines its haven like your hands at night

dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.
You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.
Take off from here.

From the end of The Cure at Troy:

Now it’s high watermark
and floodtide in the heart
and time to go.
The sea-nymphs in the spray
will be the chorus now.
What’s left to say?

Suspect too much sweet-talk
but never close your mind.
It was a fortunate wind
that blew me here. I leave
half-ready to believe
that a crippled trust might walk

and the half-true rhyme is love.

In the same Art of Poetry interview, Heaney talks about receiving the Nobel Prize: “Nothing can prepare you for it. Zeus thunders and the world blinks twice and you get to your feet again and try to keep going.” He also discusses the death of his parents (“There was a sense of an almost formal completion. But also a recognition that nothing can be learned, that to be in the presence of a death is to be in the presence of something utterly simple and utterly mysterious”). Here, the close of his poem “Clearances”:

A soul ramifying and forever
Silent, beyond silence listened for.