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.”
The Strand and Lough Beg - depiction of farm life and lack of involvement in the violence (3 quotes)
“… 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”
“Big-voiced scullions, herders, feelers round / Haycocks and hindquarters, talkers in byres, / Slow arbitrators of the burial ground.”
Restoration in Casualty (3 quotes)
“When he took me in his boat, / the screw purling, turning / Indolent fathoms white, / I tasted freedom with him.” - Imagery
“Dawn-sniffing revenant, / Plodder through midnight rain, / Question me again.”
Peace and order in Funeral rites
“They had been laid out / in tainted rooms, / their eyelids glistening, / their dough-white hands / shackled in rosary beads.”
Unity in Funeral rites (2 quotes)
“Purring family cars / nose into line, / the whole country tunes / to the muffled drumming / of ten thousand engines.”
“Quiet as a serpent / in it’s grassy boulevard, / the procession drags its tail…”
Restoration / cleansing of violence in The Strand and Lough Beg (2 quotes)
“… 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.”
Violence in Triptych (3 quotes)
“There they were, as if our memory had hatched them, / As if the unquiet founders walked again: / Two young men with rifles on the hill, Profane and bracing as their instruments.”
“Who’s sorry for our troubles?”
Victims caught up in the violence in triptych
“I think of small-eyed survivor flowers, / The pined for, unmolested orchid.”
De-evolving in triptych (2 quotes)
“I said to her, “What will become of us?” / And as forgotten water in a well might shake / At an explosion under morning…”
“Or a crack run up a gable, / She began to speak / “I think our very form is bound to change.” / dogs in a siege. Saurian relapses. Pismires.”
Despair + criticising his people in triptych (2 quotes)
“…my people think money / And talk weather. Oil rigs lull their future / On single acquisitive stems”
“The ground we kept our ear to for so long / Is flayed or calloused… Our island is full of comfortless noises.”
Using decaying monastery as a symbol for his community/faith/morality in Triptych
“On Devenish I heard a snipe / And the keeper’s recital of elegies / Under the tower. Carved monastic heads / Were crumbling like bread on water.”
Uncertainty in triptych - intrusion of the war (2 quotes)
“From a cold hearthstone on horse Island / I watched the sky beyond the open chimney / And listened to the thick rotations / Of an army helicopter patrolling.”
“How we crept before we walked! I remembered / The helicopter shadowing our march at Newry, / The scared, irrevocable steps.”
Despair - faith and ritual can no longer help - triptych
“Everything in me / wanted to bow down, to offer up, / To go barefoot, foetal and penitential, / And pray at the water’s edge.”
United lives - triptych
“And today a girl walks in home to us / Carrying a basket full of new potatoes, / Three tight green cabbages, and carrots…”
The descent into primal beliefs and selfishness can only be stopped by a voice of sanity, and end to the cycle - Triptych
“Unless forgiveness finds it’s nerve and voice, / Unless the helmeted and bleeding tree / Can green and open buds like infants’ fists / And the fouled magma incubate.”
