Traditions

‘For Tom Flanagan’

I

Our guttural muse

was bulled long ago
by the alliterative tradition,
her uvula grows

vestigial, forgotten
like the coccyx
or a Brigid’s Cross
yellowing in some outhouse

while custom, that “most
sovereign mistress”,
beds us down into
the British isles.

II

We are to be proud
of our Elizabethan English:
“varsity”, for example,
is grass-roots stuff with us;

we “deem” or we “allow”
when we suppose
and some cherished archaisms
are correct Shakespearean.

Not to speak of the furled
consonants of lowlanders
shuttling obstinately
between bawn and mossland.

III

MacMorris, gallivanting
around the Globe, whinged
to courtier and groundling
who had heard tell of us

as going very bare
of learning, as wild hares,
as anatomies of death:
“What ish my nation?”

And sensibly, though so much
later, the wandering Bloom
replied, “Ireland,” said Bloom,
“I was born here. Ireland.”

© Seamus Heaney, permissons Faber & Faber Ltd.

Seamus Heaney reflects on how the Elizabethan English of Shakespeare is still spoken in rural Northern Ireland. This raises the question - which he ultimately dismisses - of whether he is Irish or British.