Afterword

Summary

In the RTÉ documentary Out of the Marvellous, Heaney acknowledges the inevitability of the tears that accompany human experience and recommends that we ready ourselves for them. In the course of this book I have drawn attention to moments where Heaney returns to Virgil’s sense of lacrimae rerum, the tears of things that we cannot avoid. Heaney faced the reality of suffering as a young boy with the death of his brother Christopher. In his mid-thirties, the suffering inflicted by the cruelty of sectarian violence was brought home to him by the death of his second cousin Colum McCartney. His elegy for his murdered cousin begins with an epigraph from Dante’s Purgatorio, and when the ghost of McCartney returns to challenge the poet in Station Island, it is in a Dantean sequence of poems in which Heaney’s art is made to face the reality of suffering by the ghosts of those whose lives have been cut short by violence or by illness.