Here, then, was a Poet. He made his
living by his words, the way he molded them, wrote them and spoke them.
He lived by the pen, or perhaps, these days, by the keyboard. In any case, he
lived by, and he lived through, words.
His words, too, were shaped by his birth, the soft, now adulturated (through
years of travel, of being internationally famous) but still unmistakable accent
of his ever romanticized and still so troubled country. The u's gave him away,
curling around themselves in an almost circle until, at the last moment, they
threw themselves outward, to be, instead, with you. And the r's, that rolled
the way hills roll, neither hard nor soft - one longed to call them a caress,
but they were not. A stroke, a tease, a brush, a purr - those were the r's his
tongue formed, and those gave away Ireland.
When he spoke, his words were familiar; he told stories with his voice, and
with his hands. Those hands, fingers thick but wanting animation, halted, wanting
to join the telling, but somehow held back by the power they felt was in the
words. They had no words, only movement, and seemed uncertain if there was room
for movement when he read. But when he spoke, when the one hand was finally
released from the book it was holding, when he spoke poems from memory or spoke
of his life, then the hands knew, now he is ours again. Now he is no longer
the Poet, now he is a poet, and life is in his hands. And they moved and told
his stories with him.
The stories he told were marked - so his translators, his readers now given
the chance to speak, told us - by the land, by fens and hills, brine and marsh,
hawthorn and gorse. And so he spoke, too, told his story of the
man, caught for a thousand years in the bogs, the man thrown living into
the morass to die, skin now browned by the millenia spent surrounded by watery
earth - this man, with his hardened and yet still clearly human skin, this man
was his symbol of hope, his belief in renewal.
The poems sounded like the stories told at the dinner table, or to your mother; he read, he recited in conversational tone, and so the Poem became our poem, and part of life. Finishing one, he wanted another; so it was in the evening's plan. But the mass of papers on the table in front of him did not oblige him, resisted his efforts to shuffle them skilfully so the right one emerged on top. They refused his market card trick, remained hidden. And in this land of punctuality and correctness, it seemed pleasant that he could not find his poem, the evening's planned poem drowning silently in the mass of white paper.