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From: "Jean Rice" <>
Subject: [IGW] " Whatever You Say Say Nothing" - Derry's Seamus HEANEY - (DEVLIN)
Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2002 10:44:50 -0700

Born in Derry April 13,1939, Seamus Heaney was the eldest of nine children
to Margaret and Patrick Heaney, at the family farm in Mossbawn, Co. Derry.
He said, "In the 1940s, when I was the eldest child of an ever-growing
family in rural County Derry, we crowded together in the three rooms of a
traditional thatched farmstead and lived a kind of den-life which was more
or less emotionally and intellectually proofed against the outside world.
It was an intimate, physical, creaturely existence in which the night sounds
of the horse in the stable beyond one bedroom wall mingled with the sounds
of adult conversation from the kitchen beyond the other." Heaney married
Marie Devlin in 1965. In 1995, he received a Nobel Prize for Literature.
He is a well-renowed teacher and lecturer and advocate for peace in Northern
Ireland.

"WHATEVER YOU SAY, SAY NOTHING

"Religion's never mentioned here," of course.
"You know them by their eyes," and hold your tongue.
"One side's as bad as the other," never worse.
Christ, it's near time that some small leak was sprung

In the great dykes the Dutchman made
To dam the dangerous tide that followed Seamus.
Yet for all this art and sedentary trade
I am incapable. The famous

Northern reticence, the tight gag of place
And times: yes, yes. Of the "wee six" I sing
Where to be saved you only must save face
And whatever you say, say nothing.

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• [IGW] " Whatever You Say Say Nothing" - Derry's Seamus HEANEY - (DEVLIN) by "Jean Rice" <>