#wintering out

A Dublin gatepost March 2020

“If we winter this one out, we can summer anywhere.” 

Oddly enough, this is not a line of poetry; it’s a quote from an interview he gave in 1972, referring to the Troubles in Northern Ireland at a time when they were at their most deadly. It was also an oblique reference to his third collection, Wintering Out, published in the same year. In Dennis O’Driscoll’s book of interviews, Stepping Stones, SH speaks of how the title for that volume came “from memories of cattle in winter fields. Beasts standing under a hedge, plastered in wet, looking at you with big patient eyes, just taking what came until something else came along. Times were bleak, the political climate was deteriorating.”

He may also have had in mind a line from a verse called ‘Sarah-Ann’ by the Tyrone poet and Presbyterian minister, WF Marshall (1888-1959). The song – about hiring fairs – includes the line:

“I wunthered in wee Robert’s,

I can summer anywhere.”

"The Estate of Seamus Heaney"

'How different are the words "home",

"Christ", "ale", "master", on his

Lips and mine'. Stepen Dedalus

'The wool trade' - the phrase

Rambled warm as a fleece

Out of his hoard.

To shear, to bale and bleach and card

Unwound from the spools

Of his vowels

And square-set men in tunics

Who plied soft names like Bruges

In their talk, merchants

Back in the Netherlands

O all the hamlet where

Hills and flocks and streams conspired

To a language of waterwheels

A lost syntax of looms and spindles,

How they hang

Fading, in the gallery of the tongue!

And I must talk of tweed,