The sense of poetic uplift and the attention to absence which Heaney began to explore in The Haw Lantern, soar to new heights in the visionary collection Seeing Things and the two subsequent volumes The Spirit Level and Electric Light. I read Seeing Things alongside Heaney’s uncollected essay ‘Sixth Sense, Seventh Heaven’ and explore the possible influence of the Catholic theologian Jacques Maritain in Heaney’s attention to the surplus nature of language. In the poems of Seeing Things, the world of matter (a dominant theme of Heaney’s early books) gives way increasingly to a more visionary sense. This is picked up in the poems of The Spirit Level where the language of wounds, healing and cures runs as a motif throughout a collection populated by saints, characterised by healing and self-sacrifice. The theme of love and grief is picked up in the poems of Electric Light, and especially in the elegies for literary friends in the second part of the collection. Heaney’s growing sense of the truth of Virgil’s lacrimae rerum (‘the tears of things’) will increasingly inform his final two collections.

Thriving societies do not necessarily depend on high levels of wealth but on equality. First, access to employment is a key driver to create more equal societies; but the world of work is changing, becoming more automated, and less secure. Automation is likely to reduce employment opportunities, raising questions about the meaning of work in people's lives as well as how decent livable incomes can be guaranteed for all. To equip learners to navigate an uncertain and disrupted landscape of work must therefore be a central learning goal if societies are to thrive. Second, in a context where societies are becoming more not less unequal, the health of democracy must be central to education's purpose. Democracy as a driver towards equality is in trouble in many parts of the world. If it is to be renewed, learners need to understand its fundamentals and become committed to its renewal. Therefore a second learning goal in pursuit of thriving societies is to prepare young people to invent and inhabit a democracy which is participative, auhtentic and meaningful. The two levers for thriving societies – good work and democracy – must be nurtured in education's explicit purposes.