Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
Because of the Labor Day holiday, and the closure today of de Vere’s Irish Pub so the barkeeps, servers, and hosts can spend the last summer holiday with their families, there will be no Pub Quiz tonight. I look forward to seeing all of you on September 9th.
I wish to take a moment to remember Seamus Heaney, the great Irish poet who passed away Friday in Dublin at age 74. Heaney towered over Irish literature the way that William Butler Yeats had during the first 40 years of the 20th century, and for decades after his death. In fact, Heaney was thought by many to be the greatest poet writing in English. Schoolchildren throughout the UK were required to memorize his poems, and, according to a recent obituary in Slate, “In 2007, his books reportedly accounted for two-thirds of the poetry sales in the United Kingdom.” I met Heaney twice: once in the late 1980s, when I went to see him read at Harvard, and once in 1996, when he was the keynote reader at a conference in Stirling, Scotland where I gave a presentation on Robert Lowell. Heaney was just as good-humored and humble as he appears in his poems; he took some time to chat with me after signing a copy of his Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996.
Winner of the Nobel Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize, Seamus Heaney would always be associated with the physical labor of his Northern Irish forbears, so it is fitting that we remember him today on America’s Labor Day. I will leave you with Heaney’s most famous early poem, “Digging.”
Digging
By Seamus Heaney
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
Thanks for your interest in this newsletter. Please plan to join us on September 9th for another edition of the de Vere’s Irish Pub Pub Quiz!
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