Bernie Winters, who died on 6 April 2015, aged 77, was the inspiration of this photograph and this poem, which appear in ‘Easter Snow/Oster Schnee’, a bilingual book co-published by Salmon, Galway, and die horen, Bremerhaven, in 1993. In a sense the entire book, which consists of photographs of Clare Island taken by Peter Jankowsky and his translations of poems about the photographs by me, was inspired by Bernie.

The Easter Present

‘Unrequited love’s a bore
But, for someone you adore,
It’s a pleasure to be sad’
The old song says, and that
Is enough for love – or is it?

Is it enough to fill with spuds
A plastic bucket – split at the brim,
Its handle broken off, filmed
With dust since water knows when –
And carry it down from your house
While balancing on their knobliness
A plate heaped high with butter –
As always the how throws a glancing
Light on why, as the rim of paint
On the delph, so worn away there’s
Almost nothing left of it, exposes
What time has done – and then leave it
As an Easter present for
The German couple and their boy
Outside the blue-painted door?
Is that enough? Perhaps it’s not.

And yet – seen through their eyes –
How could they requite it ,
Feeling a kind of despair that,
After all, they’re not just
Foreigners out here cut off
In the wild Atlantic, a kind
Of hope that can’t believe
It’s found a home this bright,
As mild and wide and clean
As Easter snow, beyond their grief,
Between the still searching air
And the thick butter’s moisture?
And yet it has – such is the gleam
Of giving – all the room in the world.

But no, it’s not enough. Allowed
To stand while cooling down,
The milk begins to separate,
Disproving with its yellowed cream
The golden rule of gravity:
What’s heavy does not sink,
It rises up, a thickening cloud
That floats on what is thin,
The greater weight of poverty.

You skimmed the surface then –
All this takes time of course –
And dashed its richness in
A churn until you got a fresh
And looseish droplet-beaded curd,
The colour of an apricot,
That’s good enough to eat.

Good enough to eat? No, it’s not enough
To simply mate it with the spuds,
These, now, opposites of flour
Humping their shoulders in the bucket.
No, you salt it first, the salt of earth,
In case it later gets too high and rots
Like apricots, like verse without
The grain of prose to make it last,
And then you play about with it, place it
Between two ridged, biscuit-coloured
Paddle-boards, and pat it into shapes –
Folded rolls and massy globes
Like gathered cones from soft firs.

And then, knowing it is not enough,
Fearing even perhaps, in the Irish way,
That it might well be too generous –
For us friendship is often too close
To sexual love for comfort –
You bring it to the German couple
And their child, leave it there
Without a word and then go back
To your own house and close the door.

No, don’t be sad, although
By now the Easter news is old
And unrequited love is a bore –
Not to have a second self to love,
To be alone when everyone else
In the wide world seems at home,
Kissed on the way in from work,
Talked to while getting washed,
Which you do silently, being fed
With butter and spuds and then –
If only you had someone to talk to –
After watching the late news on
Television going off together to bed
To do what they do in the city –

Still, in this case as in the blue song,
It’s pleasure enough just to shut the door,
To say I love you without self-pity
And be glad as ever Adam was before….

The German couple and their son referred to in the poem were Peter, who died on 17 September 2014, his wife the painter Veronica Bolay, and their son Aengus. One Easter morning they found this present of a bucket of potatoes and a plate of butter left outside the door of the cottage where they were staying on Clare Island. To Peter and Veronica this kind of anonymous generosity to strangers was a reason to come to live in Ireland, which they did. To me, a Dubliner who only visited Clare Island after most of the poems had been written, the photograph was primarily an aesthetic object, and the story attached to it seemed a reminder, a remnant, of an ancient tradition of hospitality, discoverable, if submerged, in all cities and countries, not confined to islands off Ireland, or other remote places.
But when I wrote the poem I hadn’t met Bernie. He was an invention of his gift.
When I did meet him in 1992, and on a few occasions thereafter, I began to understand how the trait of generosity was exemplified uniquely in his character. Does that character have any intrinsic connection with Ireland? I can’t answer that question. I do know Bernie was a highly intelligent person; a complex personality who lived, deliberately, a very simple life. A lover of nature, a lower-case Green, he appreciated modernity when it appealed to him. He loved, for example, the singing of that lone star of Texas, Nanci Griffith, who, Veronica has reminded me, he travelled to see performing at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin.
Bernie was – as who could not be living on an island? – an ironist, tempered by the weather. But, in the way he related to the world, there was a touch of the mystic about him. He was also an artist. Quite late in life he took up a tradition he had known since he was a boy – a tradition known indeed since the childhood of the human race – the weaving of objects out of straw, and made something new out of it. He had no pretensions: his craft was utilitarian. Ostensibly, he produced things that could only be used: sugán chairs, baskets and such like. But the ostensible does not conceal the artistic instinct the craft allowed to emerge. One of these pieces, supposedly a place mat, I have hung on a wall beside a window in my flat where it shines back at the sun it resembles. More of these objects, which have a sculptural quality, can be seen in the memorable photograph by Michael McLaughlin that accompanies the piece about Bernie published in the Mayo News on 14 April. See:

http://www.mayonews.ie/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=21763%3Aclare-island-mourns-local-legend&catid=23%3Anews&Itemid=46#

Bernie held the key to the Cistercian abbey just a few yards away from his house at Cille on the island. When Peter first brought me there no key was needed: the building was open to the four winds and all that could be seen on its vaulted, rain-sodden ceiling was a few faint streaks of pigment, remnants (that word again) of what had once, some 700 years earlier, been paintings. They were a melancholy sight, glimpses of a former world on the brink of complete extinction. Now, after years of work, mainly by Christoph Oldenbourg and Madeleine Katkov, they have been restored and, at least in part, returned to their original state. See the images at:
http://www.clareisland.info/Heritage/iconography.htm

But they remain to be explained fully. And these days one needs permission to gain access to the abbey. In a way the frescoes are like Bernie in reverse: he can’t now be visited and he has taken the key to his life with him, leaving traces only in the memories of those who knew him, and a few things made out of straw. This should be melancholy, and it is, but it isn’t sad only. There is as well in the thought of his gift a remaining and abiding freshness, the late present of an Easter Snow.

Seamus Heaney was a brilliantly intelligent person. He was – and he knew he was – the best boy in the class. But he always did his best to keep his intelligence a secret.

In a poem in his 2010 volume Human Chain he describes how one day at Anahorish Primary School, which he attended until the age of 12, he was “sent/The privileged one, for water/To turn the the ink powder into ink”.

But the freedom that came with the privilege meant that he was missing a singing lesson, which he could hear “Coming out through opened windows/Yet still and all a world away.”

It was a lonely fate to be a singer and yet excused from singing. This loneliness had another result: he had, as he says in the poem, “A vision of the school the school/Won’t understand, nor I, not quite”.

The irony is that this clever, lonely child, a Catholic nationalist by birth, living in a remote and neglected part of the British Empire, was the beneficiary of Rab Butler’s 1944 Education Act. His education in primary school, in St Columb’s in Derry, and subsequently in Queen’s University, Belfast, was free.

He never raised his glass to the Queen, at least as her subject, and yet London made him. Without the support of Charles Monteith and Faber and Faber, the company that remained his publisher all his life, he could have been another outsider of genius, like Patrick Kavanagh, Paul Durcan or – the writer it is most interesting to compare him to – John McGahern.

It was, and is, of huge significance that his nationalism never became Provoism. Martin McGuinness may rule in Derry but he does so without any direct sanction from Derry’s greatest citizen.

Now that Heaney’s work has ended, the Irish people can begin to see his vision as a whole. It is a complex picture, marked by a great respect for the sound of language and the value of truth.

Long before he died one thing was plain: he had paid a big price for winning the Nobel prize. He exhausted himself in the service of poetry. He was generous to a fault with his time. He was dutiful on behalf of the State. It would be an exaggeration, but not a major one, to say he died for Ireland.

His intelligence was profoundly diplomatic – he could have been a great Minister for Foreign Affairs. In the small and frequently vicious world of Irish writing, he managed to avoid making enemies.

If there was a divide in him, it was between the way he understood how the world works and his desire to say that it is good.

In 2011, I had the good fortune to be one of the judges who awarded him The Irish Times Poetry Now prize for his book Human Chain.

In my speech at the award ceremony, I said all of the judges were agreed on the high quality of the 42 books in the competition.

But when we considered this array of talent, we were always driven back to a puzzlingly pleasurable question – why was Seamus the best?

In the end, I think the answer had to do with his character – I even dare say his moral character.

Throughout his work, he depended on his highly developed tactile sensitivities. Heaney felt as vividly as a baby does, and indeed in Human Chain, which was written after he had suffered a stroke, there is a sad sense of the infant miraculous, of being able to apprehend the physical world for the first time a second time.

The territory of these late poems is the scene of a serious contest, as the book’s title poem makes clear. Ostensibly it is about the delivery of food to famine victims while soldiers are firing over the heads of the mob.

But it is also about the poet’s art. The poems, like bags of meal, are backbreakingly heavy and the reward of lifting them up and passing them on is “A letting go which will not come again./ Or it will, once. And for all.”

Those three full stops and that one half-stop are deliberate. When we consider how sick he was, they give us pause in the throat.

A passage by the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana tells us something about the essential Heaney.

In the simple and ignorant age of Homer, poetry was “the sweetest and sanest that the world has known. . . Nowhere else can we find so noble a rendering of human nature, so spontaneous a delight in life, so uncompromising a dedication to beauty, and such a gift of seeing beauty in everything. Homer, the first of poets, was also the best and the most poetical.”

We can say now that Heaney was the first of our poets, the best and the most poetical of them.

Even at this moment, so soon after his death, when we consider his work as a whole, we are left with the inescapable conviction that we have been given something good by someone of good character.

His intelligence was exceptional because it allowed him to become humble. He was a master who brought his word-gift in by the servant’s entrance. Here it is:

The full of a white

Enamel bucket

Of little pears:

Still life

On the red tiles

Of that floor.

Sleeping beauty

I came on

By the scullion’s door.

Note: for reasons of space I edited the paragraph by Santayana quoted above from his essay ‘The Poetry of Barbarism’in his book ‘Interpretations of Poetry and Religion’. Here is the full quote:

It is an observation at first sight melancholy but in the end,
perhaps, enlightening, that the earliest poets are the most ideal, and
that primitive ages furnish the most heroic characters and have the
clearest vision of a perfect life. The Homeric times must have been full
of ignorance and suffering. In those little barbaric towns, in those camps
and farm, in those shipyards, there must have been much insecurity and
superstition. That age was singularly poor in all that concerns the
convenience of life and the entertainment of the mind with arts and
sciences. Yet it had a sense for civilizations. That machinery of life
which men were beginning to devise appealed to them as poetical; they
knew its ultimate justification and studied its incipient processes with
delight. The poetry of that simple and ignorant age was, accordingly, the
sweetest and sanest that the world has known; the most faultless in
taste, and the most even and lofty in inspiration. Without lacking
variety and homeliness, it bathed all things human in the golden light of
morning; it clothed sorrow in a kind of majesty, instinct with both
self-control and heroic frankness. Nowhere else can we find so noble a
rendering of human nature, so spontaneous a delight in life, so
uncompromising a dedication to beauty, and such a gift of seeing
beauty in everything. Homer, the first of poets, was also the best and
the most poetical.

This is the text of the poem set to music by Jerome De Bromhead

I Breathe A Drug

I breathe a drug
And what I call it is
The air.

The war against the war,
Against the waste of things,
Gives way to awe,
The poet’s useless pity for
The O in everything
That fights against the law
And fails.

What brought all this about?
What makes the poet think
He has it in his power
To bring his moment out
Of time and burn it in
To someone else’s hour,
To call the laws of sequence false,
And send you walking through
The blueness of an evening town
That yearns for going out
For fear of staying home?
Well, that was done to him and now
He wants to do it in return.

The town knows what is meant.
It’s covered with a sheet of doubt
Imperial in width and length,
And on it all the drops of neon light
Are sequins, like the tears
A youthful woman sheds the while
She’s lying helpless on her back
Beneath her friend the moon.

The moon is glazed with waiting.
The town has emptied out.
But still the traffic lights trip through
Their declaration of inhuman rights,
And still the streets cry Yield.
Our best weapons cannot be used,
But what use could we put peace to?
Atom bomb or Milky Way, both lose.
Victory or defeat ends with a sigh,
Threatening the walls with doors.
And look, here is an open one,
And someone coming through it,
Breathless, impatient, saying,
People have lost patience,
There’s going to be war in the streets,
The place is deserted,
I’m telling you, I was out there,
And it’s the same as in here, or nearly.