‘If we winter this one out, we can summer anywhere’: The year Heaney helped us through

Despite coronavirus, this was a relatively quiet year for that most ominous of poems, WB Yeats’s The Second Coming. Conceived during another pandemic a century ago, and the theme of thousands of doom-laden headlines ever since, it could have enjoyed yet another lease of life during a global crisis when many things fell apart and anarchy was loosed upon the world’s plans.

Instead, unexpectedly, 2020 turned out to be the year of another Irish poet, Seamus Heaney, whose more reassuring sentiments were in unprecedented demand. His words seemed to be everywhere: even written on walls. At a time when people needed mantras of stoicism and hope, Heaney was the man in the gap.

Ironically, the line he was most quoted for this year is not from one of his poems. It may not even be his. When, in 1972, Heaney said in an interview that “if we winter this one out, we can summer anywhere”, he was echoing the title of his third collection, Wintering Out, then just published.

But he was also probably thinking of another northern poet, the Ulster-Scot WF Marshal, who on the subject of hiring fairs had once written: “I wunthered in wee Robert’s, I can summer anywhere.”

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It didn’t matter. As sanctified by Heaney against the backdrop of the worst year in the Northern Troubles, the idea of wintering out in hope of summer was a line whose time had come again in 2020.

It was uttered by Leo Varadkar on Good Friday as he urged the nation to make short-term sacrifices for long-term reward. It became popular as graffiti. And even after the summer came and went with Covid untamed and another hard winter looming, it was quoted by Nicola Sturgeon in the Scottish parliament in December, “as a sentiment that resonates with many of us more strongly now than at any previous time”.

Biden favourite

Coronavirus aside, Heaney was also one of the winners of this year’s US elections. His verse from The Cure of Troy, about hope and history rhyming, was a favourite of Joe Biden, as it had been a generation earlier of Bill Clinton. It inspired campaign speeches and videos. Now, it and other Heaney poems look likely to be a running feature of the Biden-Harris White House.

Heaney’s words were also the consoling soundtrack of some of 2020’s most prominent funerals, especially those of his friends John Hume and Séamus Mallon, whose lives they had also accompanied.

Elsewhere, the poet was the subject of a major and admiring new book by Roy Foster. And while his more famous works were more quoted than ever, a cache of hitherto unpublished Heaney correspondence, including a new poem, turned up in the collection of the late painter Barrie Cooke, which is to be part of an exhibition in Cambridge University somewhere on the other side of Covid.

Heaney’s increasingly saint-like status was nowhere more obvious, meanwhile, than in his inclusion in the advance branding of one of the 2021’s more contentious events: the centenary of the birth of Northern Ireland.

Heaney would hardly have celebrated this milestone himself, but that didn’t stop the Democratic Unionist Party and others from embracing his image as part of the commemorations. It resulted in howls of derision from nationalists and republicans who pointed out that, among other things, the DUP had been conspicuously absent from the poet’s funeral in 2013.

There was a time when northern republicans were themselves at odds with Heaney for what they saw as his failure to write about their experience. But his belated embrace by the would-be celebrators of Northern Ireland’s centenary meant that the year ended with ubiquitous recitations on social media of another of his better-known, if less typical, lines: “Be advised my passport’s green. No glass of ours was ever raised to toast the Queen.”

It was a discordant end to a year during which, in Irish and American politics at least, the centre did hold, and Heaney’s poetry was usually occupying it.