Ramblings of a Twenty-Something
Blogger
Somewhere on the Internet
3rd September 2013
Dear Mr Heaney,
It is not very often that the news affects me anymore. In a world of war, crime and political agenda, it seems that the news is given to us from the same script every night with just the names and places changing. Once in a while there is a story that pulls away from this routine; a story that makes me feel something. When I heard about your passing last week on the news, I felt something.
When I was first introduced to your work back in my high school days, I was only partly aware of poetry, or at least the power of poetry. I am embarrassed to say that I tried my hand at writing verse before your work came to me - suffice to say my inadequacy was placed under a glaring spotlight. However, after I had spent some time with some of your most poignant and powerful pieces, my inadequacy became became less important and your captivating rhyme and reason took centre stage - I learned so much from you.
You will be as sad as I am when I admit that I have not penned a single verse since I was in high school. University, or at least what I am studying there, has drawn my creativity to the back-burner, with only the flickering embers of inspiration coming to me now and again. I have tried, do not get me wrong, but the words just do not come.
I am not Irish and my experience of the Troubles is based on what I see happening in your country today, rather than what happened at the time - I was also not brought up in the countryside. In short, our stories are so very far apart that is begs the question as to how your words have resonated with me so much. It might have been the way that they were taught to me or the way that they were discussed with me. It might have been the way that I was given your poetry to devour, to take home, to make my own. It might just be that your work came to me at the right time in my life. I cannot put my finger on it but maybe that is the beauty of our time together.
In the five or so years since I started writing this blog - around about the same time that I started looking at your poetry - your words have provided the sub-heading for what writing means to me. This blog, and the one before it, represents 'my place of clear water' - if you had not told me that I never would have known. Some of your words have stuck with me over the years without me ever having to go back and look at them. I believe that this is the final verse of Personal Helicon:
Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
to stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
In those four lines you capture the coming-of-age story that I have been writing for myself since I was first introduced to you. I thank you for starting that story for me and may your words be with me and a million others for decades to come.
Yours sincerely,
Martin Smail
