SEAMUS HEANEY

The Irish poet Seamus Heaney published his first book - Death of a Naturalist - in 1966. In 1995, he won The Nobel Prize for Literature.

This poem is taken from Electric Light, published in the UK by Faber and Faber in 2001.

I love the poem because it seems right about the creative process, and the impossibility of pleasing others. You might - you might not.

'Light came from the east,' he sang,
'Bright guarantee of God, and the waves went quiet.
I could see headlands and buffeted cliffs.
Often, for marked courage, fate spares the man
It has not marked already.'

And when their objection was reported to him -
That he had gone to bits and was leaving them
Nothing to hold on to, his first and last lines
Neither here nor there -
'Since when,' he asked,
'Are the first line and the last line of any poem
Where the poem begins and ends?'