For England may keep faith

[Abdiel OAbdiel]

For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead.
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse --
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.


Ciaran Carson, whose first language is Irish, wrote a
wonderful review of 'Sweeney Astray" in which he
discusses the use Heaney made of the medieval Irish
story of King Sweeney in terms of both theme and
language. Carson's judiciously weighs Heaney's
translation against both the original text, Buile
Suibhne, and other translations: 

"The ruined maid complans in Irish," writes Seamus
Heaney  in 'Ocean's Love to Ireland' (From North), a
poem which refers-among other things-to the linguistic
colonization of the island. Despite the inexhorable
erosion of the language over the past few centuries,
the ruined maid still complains in Irish: its position
of the language of revolution is, for better or worse,
enshrined in Sinn Fein's cultural policy; poetry and
prose is being written in Irish, largely ignored by
students of Irish Literature. And if Irish is still
alive, however vestigially, the position of English
can never be wholly authoritative, as Stephen Dedalus
recognizes in Portrait of the Artist: 

The language in which we are speaking is his before it
is mine. How different are the words Home, Christ,
Ale, Master on his lips and mine!  I cannot speak of
write these words without unrest of spirit. 

Heaney uses that same quotation as preface to his poem
'The Wool Trade', and the book, Wintering Out, as a
whole is informed by its concerns: 

A stagger in air
as if language 
failed…


The language is Irish. Its ghost is subliminally
present throughout the book; this is one way of trying
to ease the unrest of the linguistic dilemma
which/that  is, to a greater or lesser extent, the
heritage of every Irish writer. 


          The ruined maid complains in Irish,
         Ocean has scattered her dream of fleets,
         The Spanish prince has spilled his gold

         And failed her. Iambic drums
         Of English beat the woods where her poets
         Sink like Onan. Rush-light, mushroom-flesh,

         She fades from their somnolent clasp
         Into ringlet-breath and dew,
         The ground possessed and repossessed.




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