I have been re-reading Seamus Heaney, great Irish poet and Nobel Laureate. He was a wonderful, life-enhancing writer. Towards the end of his life he was asked whether anything he had written might serve as a suitable epitaph for himself. When pressed he quoted from his translation of the play Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles. In it the Messenger, telling how the old King dies and vanishes into the earth, says: “Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.” That, Heaney said, would do for his own epitaph. Yes, it is a good enough epitaph for any man. And his last words, texted to his wife from his hospital bed minutes before he died, were in his beloved Latin: “Noli timere” – “do not be afraid”.
In his marvellous collection of essays, The Redress of Poetry, Seamus Heaney wrote that WH Auden’s elegy for Yeats was “a rallying cry that celebrates poetry for being on the side of life, and continuity of effort, and enlargement of the spirit.” Heaney believed that one function of poetry is to act as a counterweight to hostile and oppressive forces in the world; he called this “the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality.”
