Marie Louise O'Donnell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I would first like to acknowledge Marie Heaney in the Gallery. I have always felt that Marie and Seamus Heaney were an ageless union. I know that her loss is profound and I am very grateful today to have the opportunity to hold her in our hearts and in our thoughts.

In The Cure at Troy, which is a dramatisation by Seamus Heaney of Sophocles's "Philoctetes", the chorus of elders speak these lines at the close of the play:

Now it's high watermark
and floodtide in the heart
and time to go.
The sea-nymphs in the spray
will be the chorus now.
What's left to say?
Suspect too much sweet-talk
but never close your mind.
It was a fortunate wind
that blew me here. I leave
half-ready to believe
that a crippled trust might walk
and the half-true rhyme is love.

What a fresh and a new wind gave us the unique gift that was Seamus Heaney? Yeats said that poetry found its power in its attempt to hold, in a single thought, reality and justice. Poetry has always allowed the gods to speak and the poet prophets and poet seers to be heard. Seamus Heaney was and remains our link between the gods and his human being sense of things. He was a diviner of words with which he was able to gift us, individually and nationally, with word music, imagination and a majestic mind. Bridge us back and forward to all that is best about us. Bridge us back and forward to all that is best within us.

"Your poems are miracles", said Michael Longley to him standing backstage a few weeks before he died. "If they are", said Heaney, "they are all from Bellaghy." They were all from the core, all from the beginning, all from the foundation of his life at Mossbawn. No matter where Seamus Heaney travelled, who he met or what universal or world civil gifts were bestowed on him, that well, that touchstone, that shape, that sound and that sculpture of Bellaghy's influence never ran dry. It never left him. It was his home. It was his heartbeat, his ear, his eye, his taste, his smell, the contours of the palm of his hand, the clock of his imagination, the language of his life and, above all, the plough, which became his pen.

When Heaney decided to use The Government of the Tongue as a general title for the 1986 T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures, a title that well befits us here in the Seanad since it is the government of the tongue that we most use in this House, what he had in mind was poetry as its own vindicating force. Would that we could parallel such vindication. Would that we, as a Seanad, could parallel such valediction.

He, above all else since Yeats, earned that right to govern both through his extraordinary precious mind and through the world-wonder of his words. He wrote in these essays about the poet's power to open up the unexpected, the unedited communication between our nature and the nature of the reality we inhabit - a conduit for the gods. Poetry was Heaney's threshold, not a path, and he constantly approached and departed from it, and gave the reader and writer an ability to undergo in different ways the experience, as he said, of being at the same time summoned to it and released by it.

I ask Senators what we are to do now that he has left us for the gods. What now for our bare-faced world? Where are we to turn now for imagination against the pulse of steel and the repetition of intolerances? Who will fill the world with the wonder of word-beauty that has gone abroad forever with him? We are on what Heaney would call a shifting sand, a sea changed, because we have lost a cosmic elder and the vacuum is very hard to fill.

What will continue is his poetry. It will continue to be as redemptive and as illusory as love because Heaney's mind and tongue was always free from predicaments. He was able to hunker us down to some good place outside and away from what he called cultural anxiety. He cleared so many of our own spaces for us and we should be, and we are, so grateful. His work is his gift to us.

C.S. Lewis said that we read to know that we are not alone. Through Heaney's poetry we will come to know the truth of that statement but it was also when Heaney spoke his verse that we became truly connected, spoken tonic solfa, treble and base, rise and fall, thin and full, quiet Bellaghy rhythms of meaning and feeling, pitch and fork, perfect on the tongue. When he read his work aloud, child and man knew they were in the presence of a mastermind, a spoken Mozart:

I stepped it, perch by perch.
Unbraiding rushes and grass
I opened my right of way
through old bottoms and sowed-out ground
and gathered stones off the ploughing
to raise a small cairn
Cleaned out the drains
faced the hedges
often got up at dawn
to walk the outlying fields.
I composed habits for those acres
so that my last look would
neither gluttonous nor starved
I was ready to go anywhere.

And he did. He went everywhere with the words, and he brought us with him. He moved us through his poetic world. How rich we are, and will be, because of him. How very privileged we are to have known him. Those that the gods love, need and want, Marie, die far too soon. May he rest in peace.