I never get tired of seeing Seamus Heaney in the top 100 Irish poems list. This one comes in at number 87. I think next time I will have to write about his other poem Digging, which is one of my favourite of his. I send out a new poem from the top 100 list every Friday on my weekly dose of Irish, if you don’t know already. You can get your weekly dose of Irish here for free.
I also found a video of Heaney reading the poem in 2013. You can watch him reading it under my notes on the poem. The poem will make you want to take a trip to Clare in September or October. I was there a few years ago, and I can confirm how amazing it is from his descriptions. Of course, he puts the words in a much better way than just “amazing”.
Here are my notes on this fantastic Irish poem by Seamus Heaney.
Postscript Poem By Seamus Heaney
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.
Postscript invites you to take a drive along the Flaggy Shore in north Clare in the autumn, when sea, lake, stone and a flock of swans all catch the wind and the light at once. Then it turns. A moment like that cannot be stopped and kept. The best you can do is stay open to it while it lasts.
The poem grew out of a real afternoon. Heaney was out driving with his wife Marie and their friends Brian and Anne Friel on the Galway Bay coast, and the wind, the light and the swans stayed with him. He said later that it came to him quickly, in a single burst, while he was busy writing a lecture. It was first published in The Irish Times, and he said sending it there was partly a way of posting a holiday card to the Friels, a PS of sorts.
It is the last poem in The Spirit Level (1996), the first collection he published after winning the Nobel Prize. On the surface it is about a drive in the west. Underneath, it is about staying open to wonder, and it has become one of his best loved short poems.
Read the full poem: Postscript by Seamus Heaney at The Irish Times. You will also find it in The Spirit Level (Faber and Faber).
Enjoyed the poem? Now you can enjoy the great Seamus Heaney reading the poem in 2013.