Seamus Heaney, the great Irish poet of mud and muck, is dead. No better tribute than to cite a few of his many haunting lines, these from his poem “Anahorish”:
My ‘place of clear water,’
the first hill in the world
where springs washed into
the shiny grass
and darkened cobbles
in the bed of the lane.
Anahorish, soft gradient
of consonant, vowel-meadow,
after-image of lamps
swung through the yards
on winter evenings.
