The dotted line my father's ashplant made
On Sandymount Strand
Is something else the tide won't wash away.

Seamus Heaney


Go to quote


words...To lure the tribal shoals to epigram / And order.

Seamus Heaney

Tags: words poetry order tribes lures



Go to quote


He sits, strong and blunt as a Celtic cross,
Clearly used to silence and an armchair:
Tonight the wife and children will be quiet
At slammed door and smoker's cough in the hall.

Seamus Heaney

Tags: poetry



Go to quote


We want what the woman wanted in the prison queue in Leningrad, standing there with cold and whispering for fear, enduring the terror of Stalin's regime and asking the poet Anna Akhmatova if she could describe it all, if her art was equal to it.

Seamus Heaney


Go to quote


I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

Seamus Heaney

Tags: poetry writing



Go to quote


It is said that once upon a time St. Kevin was kneeling with his arms stretched out in the form of a cross in Glendalough. . . As Kevin knelt and prayed, a blackbird mistook his outstretched hand for some kind of roost and swooped down upon it, laid a clutch of eggs in it and proceeded to nest in it as if it were the branch of a tree. Then, overcome with pity and constrained by his faith to love all creatures great and small, Kevin stayed immobile for hours and days and nights and weeks, holding out his hand until the eggs hatched and the fledging grew wings, true to life if subversive of common sense, at the intersection of natural process and the glimpsed ideal, at one and the same time a signpost and a reminder. Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.

Seamus Heaney


Go to quote


Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Seamus Heaney

Tags: poetry writing digging



Go to quote


And a young prince must be prudent like that,
giving freely while his father lives
so that afterwards, in age when fighting starts
steadfast companions will stand by him
and hold the line.

Seamus Heaney

Tags: leadership gifts beowulf seamus-heaney



Go to quote


Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker's father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.

History says, don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there's fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.

Seamus Heaney


Show the quote in German

Show the quote in French

Show the quote in Italian

Go to quote


By God, the old man could handle a spade.

Just like his old man.

Seamus Heaney


Go to quote


« first previous
Page 3 of 5.
next last »

©gutesprueche.com

Data privacy

Imprint
Contact
Wir benutzen Cookies

Diese Website verwendet Cookies, um Ihnen die bestmögliche Funktionalität bieten zu können.

OK Ich lehne Cookies ab