We travelled to Heaney's birthplace at Mossbawn (between Toome and Castledawson) and visited places in rural South Derry that had featured in many of his poems. At the age of 12 he began to move away, gaining a scholarship to a boarding school in Derry and from there he went to Belfast to study at Queen's.
His early life experience features so much in his poetry. This trip showed me just how formative his childhood wanderings and close observation of rural life had been. And just how much had changed in that country during the sixty years or so since. Instead of being populated by thatched farmsteads on wee lanes through the bogland, the country was filled with large detatched houses with wrought-iron gates and agribusinesses. But we went to two special places that were pretty much unchanged.
The forge: a tiny thatched cottage, where we were given a guided tour by the retired blacksmith, a contemporary of Seamus's, who had grown up there. The tiny cottage was divided in two by a curtain: on the one side the forge and bellows, surrounded by anvils, hammers and all manners of blacksmiths tools; on the other, a hearth with small black range and two armchairs, the family slept in the eaves on a wooden platform.
Lough Beg: not a true lough, but a widening of the river Bann into wetlands where cattle grazed and Seamus used to play with friends, most notably his cousin who was murdered by paramilitaries in 1975. This was the source of one of his finest poems.
May he rest in peace.
The Strand at Lough Beg
In Memory of Colum McCartney
All round this little island, on the strand
Far down below there, where the breakers strive
Grow the tall rushes from the oozy sand.
--Dante, Purgatorio, I, 100-3
Leaving the white glow of filling stations
And a few lonely streetlamps among fields
You climbed the hills toward Newtownhamilton
Past the Fews Forest, out beneath the stars--
Along the road, a high, bare pilgrim's track
Where Sweeney fled before the bloodied heads,
Goat-beards and dogs' eyes in a demon pack
Blazing out of the ground, snapping and squealing.
What blazed ahead of you? A faked road block?
The red lamp swung, the sudden brakes and stalling
Engine, voices, heads hooded and the cold-nosed gun?
Or in your driving mirror, tailing headlights
That pulled out suddenly and flagged you down
Where you weren't known and far from what you knew:
The lowland clays and waters of Lough Beg,
Church Island's spire, its soft treeline of yew.
There you used hear guns fired behind the house
Long before rising time, when duck shooters
Haunted the marigolds and bulrushes,
But still were scared to find spent cartridges,
Acrid, brassy, genital, ejected,
On your way across the strand to fetch the cows.
For you and yours and yours and mine fought the shy,
Spoke an old language of conspirators
And could not crack the whip or seize the day:
Big-voiced scullions, herders, feelers round
Haycocks and hindquarters, talkers in byres,
Slow arbitrators of the burial ground.
Across that strand of ours the cattle graze
Up to their bellies in an early mist
And now they turn their unbewildered gaze
To where we work our way through squeaking sedge
Drowning in dew. Like a dull blade with its edge
Honed bright, Lough Beg half shines under the haze.
I turn because the sweeping of your feet
Has stopped behind me, to find you on your knees
With blood and roadside muck in your hair and eyes,
Then kneel in front of you in brimming grass
And gather up cold handfuls of the dew
To wash you, cousin. I dab you clean with moss
Fine as the drizzle out of a low cloud.
I lift you under the arms and lay you flat.
With rushes that shoot green again, I plait
Green scapulars to wear over your shroud.
All round this little island, on the strand
Far down below there, where the breakers strive
Grow the tall rushes from the oozy sand.
--Dante, Purgatorio, I, 100-3
Leaving the white glow of filling stations
And a few lonely streetlamps among fields
You climbed the hills toward Newtownhamilton
Past the Fews Forest, out beneath the stars--
Along the road, a high, bare pilgrim's track
Where Sweeney fled before the bloodied heads,
Goat-beards and dogs' eyes in a demon pack
Blazing out of the ground, snapping and squealing.
What blazed ahead of you? A faked road block?
The red lamp swung, the sudden brakes and stalling
Engine, voices, heads hooded and the cold-nosed gun?
Or in your driving mirror, tailing headlights
That pulled out suddenly and flagged you down
Where you weren't known and far from what you knew:
The lowland clays and waters of Lough Beg,
Church Island's spire, its soft treeline of yew.
There you used hear guns fired behind the house
Long before rising time, when duck shooters
Haunted the marigolds and bulrushes,
But still were scared to find spent cartridges,
Acrid, brassy, genital, ejected,
On your way across the strand to fetch the cows.
For you and yours and yours and mine fought the shy,
Spoke an old language of conspirators
And could not crack the whip or seize the day:
Big-voiced scullions, herders, feelers round
Haycocks and hindquarters, talkers in byres,
Slow arbitrators of the burial ground.
Across that strand of ours the cattle graze
Up to their bellies in an early mist
And now they turn their unbewildered gaze
To where we work our way through squeaking sedge
Drowning in dew. Like a dull blade with its edge
Honed bright, Lough Beg half shines under the haze.
I turn because the sweeping of your feet
Has stopped behind me, to find you on your knees
With blood and roadside muck in your hair and eyes,
Then kneel in front of you in brimming grass
And gather up cold handfuls of the dew
To wash you, cousin. I dab you clean with moss
Fine as the drizzle out of a low cloud.
I lift you under the arms and lay you flat.
With rushes that shoot green again, I plait
Green scapulars to wear over your shroud.
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