Seamus Heaney Poetry Quotes Flashcards
Injustice in Casualty (2 quotes) - curfew
“But my tentative art / His turned back watches too: / He was blown to bits / Out drinking in a curfew / Others obeyed, three nights / After they shot dead / The thirteen men in Derry.”
“PARAS THIRTEEN, the walls said, / BOGSIDE NIL. That wednesday / Everybody held / Their breath and trembled,”
Despair due to death, in casualty (3 quotes)
“It was a day of cold / Raw silence, windblown / Surplice and soutane: / Rained-on, flower-laden / Coffin after coffin seemed to float from the door / Of the packed cathedral / Like blossoms on slow water.” - Imagery
“The common funeral / unrolled it’s swaddling band, / lapping, tightening / Til we were braced and bound / like brothers in a ring.”
“I missed his funeral, / Those quiet walkers / And sideways talkers / Shoaling out of his land / To the respectable / Purring of the hearse…”
Disunity - relationship between the individual and society in Casualty (2 quotes)
“But he would not be held / At home by his own crowd / Whatever threats were phoned, / Whatever black flags waved.”
“How culpable was he / That last night when he broke / Our tribe’s complicity?”
Injustice - terrifying experience of death in casualty
“I see him as he turned / In that bombed offending place, / Remorse filled with terror / In his still unknowable face, / His cornered outfaced stare / Blinding in the flash.” - Imagery
Despair in funeral rites (2 quotes)
“Now as news comes in / of each neighbourly murder / we pine for ceremony, / customary rhythms:”
“… the cud of memory / allayed for once, arbitration / of the feud placated…”
Restoration in funeral rites
“Disposed like Gunner / who lay beautiful / inside his burial mound, / though dead by violence. / unavenged.”
Uncertainty of times in Whatever You Say, Say Nothing - religion
“The times are out of joint / But I incline much to rosary beads…”
Disunity in Whatever You Say, Say Nothing (2 quotes)
“As to the jottings and analyses / Of politicians and newspapermen / Who’ve scribbled down the long campaign from gas / And protest to gelignite and sten…”
“Who proved their pulses ‘escalate’, / ‘Backlash’ and ‘crack down’, ‘the provisional wing’, / ‘Polarization’ and ‘long standing hate’.”
Activating change/speaking out in Whatever You Say, Say Nothing
“Yet I live here, I live here too, I sing…”
Uncertainty of who to trust in Whatever You Say, Say Nothing. (3 quotes)
“Sucking the fake taste, the stony flavours / Of those sanctioned, old, elaborate retorts: “Oh, it’s disgraceful, surely, I agree.” / “Where’s it going to end?” “It’s getting worse.””
“The ‘voice of sanity’ is getting worse.”
Heaney rejecting the attitudes that avoid sectarian identity, and rejecting people who sit on the fence - contemptuous of complacency in Whatever You Say, Say Nothing.
‘“Religion’s never mentioned here”, of course. / “You know them by their eyes,” and hold your tongue. / “One side’s as bad as the other,” never worse.’
silence and passiveness in Whatever You Say, Say Nothing.
“Smoke-signals are loud-mouthed compared with us” - hyperbole
Injustice (cultural discrimination) in Whatever You Say, Say Nothing. (2 quotes)
“Subtle discrimination by addresses”
“That Norman, Ken and Sidney signalled Prod / And Seamus (call me Sean) was sure-fire Pape.”
Uncertainty of attacks in Whatever You Say, Say Nothing. (2 quotes)
“O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod, / Of open minds as open as a trap…”
“Where tongues lie coiled, as under flames lie wicks, / Where half of us, as in wooden horse / were cabin’d and confined like wily Greeks…”
Corruption and deception of authority / Injustice in The Strand at Lough Beg (3 quotes)
“What blazed ahead of you? A faked roadblock?”
“Engine, voices, heads hooded and the cold nosed gun?”
“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.”
