Poetry and the Masses

[Leanne]

Heaney's great strength for me was in the breadth and depth of his knowledge. No subject was sacred. Nothing was above ridicule, and nothing was beneath appreciation. He drew upon the past to illuminate the present, like in Beacons at Bealtaine:



Beacons at Bealtaine
Phoenix Park, May Day, 2004

Uisce: water. And fionn: the water's clear.
But dip and find this Gaelic water Greek:
A phoenix flames upon fionn uisce here.

Strangers were barbaroi to the Greek ear.
Now let the heirs of all who could not speak
The language, whose ba-babbling was unclear,

Come with their gift of tongues past each frontier
And find the answering voices that they seek
As fionn and uisce answer phoenix here.

The May Day hills were burning, far and near,
When our land's first footers beached boats in the creek
In uisce, fionn, strange words that soon grew clear;

So on a day when newcomers appear
Let it be a homecoming and let us speak
The unstrange word, as it behoves us here,

Move lips, move minds and make new meanings flare
Like ancient beacons signalling, peak to peak,
From middle sea to north sea, shining clear
As phoenix flame upon fionn uisce here.


Heaney riffs on some of the Gaelic bardic techniques -- the importance of alliteration, the dunadh (although he doesn't use it as a true start/finish pair, but embeds it a little bit) and of course the rhyme. I expect this poem would appeal to a fairly wide audience just on surface reading as it sounds lovely, but it has even greater value when you can recognise the technical skill involved in putting it together and still keeping it relevant.