Finding the right words in which to speak for us

So unerringly has Heaney pitched his responses to Ireland's most intense joys and sorrows that it is easy to forget just how diminished our national discourse would have been without his contribution, writes Dennis O'Driscol

IN HIS 70 years, Seamus Heaney has lived through many eras, growing up in rural Derry, where blackberry-picking was an annual rite, and entering the age of the BlackBerry smartphone. His first light flickered from candles and paraffin lamps; by 1995, the Nobel Foundation's spotlight had beamed in his direction. From the present age, when spring water is commercially bottled and marketed, he can look back on a childhood in which household water was carried from iron pumps and stone wells. Having been all ears for the crackling voices from a wet battery wireless in the 1940s, he has lived to record each of his poetry collections on CD.

Every period of his life, from second World War to Iraq War, from the Twelfth of July marches of his boyhood to the September 11th attacks pondered in District and Circle (2006), has left a mark on his work, as he has certainly left an indelible mark on our own times.

"Congratulations, Seamus, on the winnings!" was how one Derry neighbour greeted him after the Nobel Prize. And all of us in Ireland are, in a sense, winners - as readers and citizens - to live in the Heaney era.

Sometimes I think of Seamus Heaney as a writer under siege; like the corncrake in his poem Serenades, who is "lost in a no man's land/ Between combines and chemicals", his habitat is constantly being encroached on. Distracting invitations, requests and demands of every kind arrive constantly from all over the globe. Yet he has coped and adapted, publishing 11 very distinguished and very different poetry collections so far. As well as registering many eras, he has represented many constituencies. Although Derry born and Dublin resident, he has been the sitting poetry member for Harvard and Oxford (where, judicious critic and spellbinding lecturer that he is, he held professorships); and - one of the world's most admired and translated poets - he holds a permanent seat in the United Nations of poetry. Where he differs from a politician is in the fact that - as a true independent, who signs up to nobody's manifesto (poetical or political) - he has fulfilled every promise, and never lost his public's confidence.

In the 30 years since Christopher Ricks described him as "the most trusted poet of our islands", Heaney has become associated with a further constituency - the exacting one described in From the Republic of Conscience (his poem commissioned by Amnesty International); there, he is exhorted "to consider myself a representative" of that Republic and "to speak on their behalf in my own tongue". So unerringly - in poems, newspaper essays and broadcasts - has he pitched his responses to Ireland's most intense joys and sorrows that it is easy to forget just how diminished the level of our national discourse, and the language in which it is conducted, would have been without his contribution. His integrity, sound judgment and subtle eloquence have helped to heal wounds, narrow divisions and inspire hopes.

DURING HIS TIME as a Queen's University student, he was the fear a t¡ at home in rural Derry for the Sunday night c‚il¡s, summoning the wallflowers to their feet for the Siege of Ennis, announcing who had won the tin of Jacob's USA Assorted in the raffle, or calling on some brilliantined swain to return to the car park pronto and move his Ford Anglia out of the way. Seamus Heaney has gone on to serve, in a much more consequential sense, as a kind of fear a t¡ for Ireland: finding the right words with which to speak for us, and to us, when the compromised language of church and State misses its mark, loses its nerve, or fails to rise adequately to an occasion.

He has been elegist of the Ulster dead. Comforter of the bereaved. Morale-booster of the living. Welcomer and encourager of new poets. Memory bank of ballads and poems. Custodian of old and endangered usages. Virtuoso of the Anglo-sax. Joint wielder of schoolbag and rattlebag. Sweeney woodsman. Station Island pilgrim. Ungovernor of tongues. Derry Caedmon. Hopkins kith. Kavanagh kin. Eel-charmer, bog-eulogiser, Dante circler, neologism-weaver. Mage, melodist and mystic of language.

With his awesome range of language, at times as dense and lush as the undergrowth of a rain forest, at other times as bare as barbed wire coiled around the forbidding walls of a gulag, he has re-animated English - revived it one might say. To a global language, frayed and soiled by use and abuse, he has brought his personal dialect, his guttural muse and his phonetic finesse as refreshment and restorative, renewing and enhancing the capacity of English to register feelings and record emotions. The greatness of his poetry lies in the breadth of its vision, the depth of its empathy, the delicacy of its address, the piquancy of its emotion, and the unique pitch, cadence, texture and numinous glow of its language.

One of my most recent encounters with Seamus Heaney occurred last November on the stage of the Abbey Theatre, where Stepping Stones - my book of interviews with the poet - was launched with an interview by Vincent Woods for RTÉ Radio 1's Arts Show.

The location set me thinking of the degree to which Heaney has (literally and metaphorically) played a part on the Irish stage, just as Yeats - who was so passionately involved in founding and furthering the Abbey Theatre - contributed to the national life of his time: responding artistically to political violence; fostering important cultural developments; not flinching from a public role. And Heaney, who was one of the directors of Field Day (for which The Cure at Troy, his version of Sophocles' Philoctetes, was written), is himself a man of the theatre.

His version of Sophocles' Antigone, The Burial at Thebes, was commissioned by the Abbey, where Yeats's "versions for the modern stage" of King Oedipus and Oedipus at Colonus (from the same Theban cycle) were first produced.

In November, as we clambered our way backstage through the set for Bertolt Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, I wondered what, if the Abbey were to dramatise the first 70 years of Seamus Heaney's life, the sound effects might include. There would doubtless be the train that ran behind the childhood home in Mossbawn, sending little shivers of distress rippling across the buckets of drinking water. Or the satisfying splash of newly peeled potatoes into water; the lonesome lash of combers along the Flaggy Shore. The "sluice-rush, spillage and backwash" of a rain stick. And how about 70 musical strikes from Barney Devlin of Hillhead, the mettlesome blacksmith depicted in The Forge, the same man who reappears in a District and Circle poem, hammering home the advent of the new millennium on his anvil? Above all, there would be "the music of what happens" - that characteristic Heaney score which can both lift and break the heart.

Among the thousands of comments I collected for my Bloodaxe Book of Poetry Quotations, Heaney was particularly struck by two remarks from his great exemplar and fellow Nobel laureate, Czeslaw Milosz. One - "Poetry is a dividend from...what you are" - has since been cited in his poem, On His Work in the English Tongue.It is a revealing choice of quotation, reflecting Heaney's commitment to the ethical role of poetry and the essential humanism of the art. His devoted generosity - the legacy surely of an old-world country upbringing - towards those in the poetry neighbourhood (young budding bards and ivied old hands alike), and towards many others whom he has befriended, admired or mourned in the wider neighbourhood, has frequently required him to put life before art. The dividend, however, has been an art of integrity and compassion; one as empathetic, as unpretentious and indeed as undeluded as the man himself.

His other favourite Milosz quotation asserts that "Poetry below a certain level of awareness is not good poetry and cannot save people." The "level of awareness" a poet displays, not the gravity of his or her subject-matter, is what separates the substantial poem from the trivial one. Heaney invests things which are usually ignored - a clump of mint, a pitchfork, a haw bush - with profound significance, presenting them palpably and robustly as themselves (thanks to his exceptional conjuring powers of evocation and description), but also infusing them with visionary intensity and moral authority.

And is anyone more quotable than Heaney himself? He will describe poetry as "language in orbit" or declare that a Gerard Manley Hopkins line "brings you to your senses: like hearing a woodpecker at dawn, or walking across a beach of small crunching shells". But, of all the stray Heaney remarks I treasure, the one that still mesmerises me most is this spontaneous cadenza from an interview in 1988: "Fundamentally, what I want from poetry is the preciousness and foundedness of wise feeling become eternally posthumous in perfect cadence. Good poetry reminds you that writing is writing, it's not just expectoration or self-regard or a semaphore for self's sake.

"You want it to touch you at the melting point below the breastbone and the beginning of the solar plexus. You want something sweetening and at the same time something unexpected, something that has come through constraint into felicity.

"Innocent though the world evoked in his poems may sometimes appear to be, Heaney is never in denial about human suffering and violence. While believing that we were "made for summer, shade and coolness/ And gazing through an open door at sunlight", he knows, as citizen of the Republic of Conscience, that the darkness too must be admitted, negotiated and confronted. No ambassador of that Republic, the poem avers, "would ever be relieved" from duty; and, true to this permanent mandate, his poetry extends its "awareness" beyond the Troubles (scrupulously explored in North, Field Work and Station Island) to the Jewish Holocaust and the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq:

the staggered walk
Of a donkey on the TV newslast night -
Loosed from a cart that had
loosed five mortar shells
In the bazaar district,
wandering out of shot
Lost to its owner, lost for its
sunlit hills

If he played something of a Yeatsian role in a time of Irish violence, his Wordsworthian gifts are needed in an age when the natural world is being catastrophically imperilled. He delivered the memorial eulogies for many notable poets, including Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Joseph Brodsky and RS Thomas. He was the speaker at the dedication of an Oscar Wilde window in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey. He has been quoted by Bill Clinton, befriended by Prince Charles, denounced by Ian Paisley's Protestant Telegraph, visited in his Wicklow cottage by the Emperor and Empress of Japan. He is the subject of a thousand PhDs, and himself the recipient of so many honorary degrees that I once speculated they must exceed in number the doctorates held by the entire staff of many medium-sized American universities.

Mellifluous broadcaster. Circulator of New Yorker cartoons. "Jocund company". Absorbing fellow traveller, whether on the domestic run from Sandymount to Bellaghy (with a caffeine pitstop at some drowsy hotel) or, in the spotless light of New Mexico, on the High Road from Santa Fe to Taos (making a dusty pilgrimage to the sun-stilled, adobe-baked Chimay¢ church, with its "sacred clay"). Devoted husband, father, grandfather. Solicitous friend, chuckling conversationalist, world champion correspondent and - with Marie, his lifelong companion and inspiration - most hospitable of hosts. Seamus Heaney at 70, this is your life!