Mid-Term Break
1966

I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o’clock our neighbors drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying–
He had always taken funerals in his stride–
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were “sorry for my trouble,”
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o’clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four foot box, a foot for every year

Seamus Heaney
Born: 13 April 1939, Castledawson, Ireland
Nationality: Irish
Died: 30 August 2013, Dublin, Ireland

Heaney was a poet, playwright, and translator. He is recognized as one of the principal contributors to poetry in Ireland in his lifetime with works including ‘Death of a Naturalist’ in 1966. The Independent described him as ‘probably the best-known poet in the world’ upon his death in 2013

Requiem for the Croppies
1969

The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley…
No kitchens on the run, no striking camp…
We moved quick and sudden in our own country.
The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp.
A people hardly marching… on the hike…
We found new tactics happening each day:
We’d cut through reins and rider with the pike
And stampede cattle into infantry,
Then retreat through hedges where cavalry must be thrown.
Until… on Vinegar Hill… the final conclave.
Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.
The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.
They buried us without shroud or coffin
And in August… the barley grew up out of our grave

Seamus Heaney
Born: 13 April 1939, Castledawson, Ireland
Nationality: Irish
Died: 30 August 2013, Dublin, Ireland

Heaney was a poet, playwright, and translator. He is recognised as one of the principal contributors to poetry in Ireland in his lifetime with works including ‘Death of a Naturalist’ in 1966. The Independent described him as ‘probably the best-known poet in the world’ upon his death in 2013.

Follower
1966

My father worked with a horse-plough,
His shoulders globed like a full sail strung
Between the shafts and the furrow.
The horse strained at his clicking tongue.

An expert. He would set the wing
And fit the bright steel-pointed sock.
The sod rolled over without breaking.
At the headrig, with a single pluck

Of reins, the sweating team turned round
And back into the land. His eye
Narrowed and angled at the ground,
Mapping the furrow exactly.

I stumbled in his hob-nailed wake,
Fell sometimes on the polished sod;
Sometimes he rode me on his back
Dipping and rising to his plod.

I wanted to grow up and plough,
To close one eye, stiffen my arm.
All I ever did was follow
In his broad shadow round the farm.

I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,
Yapping always. But today
It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away

Seamus Heaney
Born: 13 April 1939, Castledawson, Ireland
Nationality: Irish
Died: 30 August 2013, Dublin, Ireland

Heaney was a poet, playwright, and translator. He is recognised as one of the principal contributors to poetry in Ireland in his lifetime with works including ‘Death of a Naturalist’ in 1966. The Independent described him as ‘probably the best-known poet in the world’ upon his death in 2013

Death Of a Naturalist
1966

All year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.
There were dragon-flies, spotted butterflies,
But best of all was the warm thick slobber
Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water
In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring
I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied
Specks to range on window-sills at home,
On shelves at school, and wait and watch until
The fattening dots burst into nimble-
Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how
The daddy frog was called a bullfrog
And how he croaked and how the mammy frog
Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was
Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too
For they were yellow in the sun and brown
In rain.
Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it

Seamus Heaney
Born: 13 April 1939, Castledawson, Ireland
Nationality: Irish
Died: 30 August 2013, Dublin, Ireland

Heaney was a poet, playwright, and translator. He is recognised as one of the principal contributors to poetry in Ireland in his lifetime with works including ‘Death of a Naturalist’ in 1966. The Independent described him as ‘probably the best-known poet in the world” upon his death in 2013