Proud-pied April: Shaking scythes at cannon

Time for another round of Irish for National Poetry Month. So let’s hear from Seamus Heaney, who was born in Ulster, but whose Nationalist sensibilities led him to move to the Republic.

Heaney was a master of language—in addition to his own works, he translated Irish poetry, Beowulf and Horace, to much acclaim. He was also a teacher, notably in distinguished appointments to Harvard and then Oxford. Here’s what he had to say about his work: “When a poem rhymes, when a form generates itself, when a metre provokes consciousness into new postures, it is already on the side of life. When a rhyme surprised and extends the fixed relations between words that in itself protests against necessity. When language does more than enough, as it does in all achieved poetry, it opts for the condition of overlife, and rebels at limit.”

When he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, the committee cited his “works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.”

Many of those works were about Ireland and Irish history, including “Requiem for the Croppies,” which he published on the 50^th anniversary of the Easter Rising. The poem commemorates the 1798 rebellion, which was Heaney’s way of honoring the events of 1916. What you need to know is that the rebels of 1798 were called croppy boys (reference to their close-cropped hair, which contrasted with the perukes of the ruling English); they fought with pikes (Catholics could not legally own firearms); and the grain they carried was their rations.

“Requiem for the Croppies”

The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley...
No kitchens on the run, no striking camp...
We moved quick and sudden in our own country.
The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp.
A people hardly marching... on the hike...
We found new tactics happening each day:
We'd cut through reins and rider with the pike
And stampede cattle into infantry,
Then retreat through hedges where cavalry must be thrown.
Until... on Vinegar Hill... the final conclave.
Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.
The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.
They buried us without shroud or coffin
And in August... the barley grew up out of our grave.

The imagery of the mass graves sprouting grain invokes both ineffable sorrow and the hope of resurrection. In Heaney’s view, the barley fed by the blood of the croppy boys grew like dragons' teeth into the Easter Rising, and—eventually—to the independence of Ireland.