Requiem For The Croppies By Seamus Heaney

Croppy Boy Memorial, Tralee, Ireland

My own view of Heaney is that he always was, and still is, too close to the British establishment. Or any establishment available. This poem hints at an affinity with Irish Nationalism. But Heaney never committed even to the half-way house nationalists of the SDLP or Peoples Democracy. He never committed to anything much.He says that it is because he is a 'quietist' who lived in a rural community cheek by jowl with Protestants. But if you lived in Northern Ireland at a time of discrimination, torture, internment, Bloody Sunday and the sectarian pogroms which killed even members of his own family, quietism was not a credible option. He often worked for the BBC in those days at a time when his career and reputation were developing. The British Broadcasting Corporation enhanced his ticket. The commissions would have dried up soon enough if he had even hinted at criticising what remained of British pretensions to govern in Ireland. He knew that. I have a depressing picture of him in, say, 1972, Donegal tweed cap in hand, saying to the Director General of the BBC 'Good Luck to your lordship'. All the same, this is a great poem and a vignette of what he could have been. I know he's a Nobel Laureate. But so is Obama.



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.