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Listen to Seamus Heaney\u2019s Ribbons, read by Freya McClements![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/K2LUGXTVBTRC45Z6YAEXMPJLYY.jpg\")
A young Seamus Heaney. Photograph: Faber and Faber \u2018We\u2019re in that cherished, reanimated territory of Heaney\u2019s home ground\u2019- By Dr Rosie Lavan<\/p>\nIn the name of the colours,
\nEmerald, cornflower blue,
\nRuby, primrose and white,<\/p>\n
In the name of ringlets and curls,
Polka dots, partings and plaits
And double-tied bows . . .<\/p>\n
To-day the photographer comes
With his tripod and cowl
And plaited retractable snout,<\/p>\n
A five-legged beast
Of gesticulation and blather
They\u2019ll outface together,<\/p>\n
Steady and far off and solemn
As orphans posed at a rail
In the last days of sail,<\/p>\n
Beyond the pale of the selves
They are due to become,
The one thing immutable still<\/p>\n
The roughcast grey of the wall
Of the school, plus
The knitted classic Fair Isle<\/p>\n
Patterns, plus their names on the roll
As transcribed on the slats of the bench,
In a copperplate hand \u2013<\/p>\n
All that, and the strictly tied bows,
And one right arm and one left,
Each placed to be seen round the other\u2019s<\/p>\n
Shoulder, as ordered.<\/p>\n
Listen to Seamus Heaney\u2019s Ribbons, read by Freya McClementsA young Seamus Heaney. Photograph: Faber and Faber \u2018We\u2019re in that cherished, reanimated territory of Heaney\u2019s home ground\u2019- By Dr Rosie Lavan<\/p>\n
In a photograph of Seamus Heaney<\/a> and four of his siblings as children, reproduced in Dennis O\u2019Driscoll\u2019s indispensable book Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (2008), the poet\u2019s sisters, Sheena and Ann, have ribbons in their hair. The photograph is dated c1950, so Seamus would have been about 11 years old; the girls, who followed him immediately in the sequence of nine children of whom he was the eldest, a couple of years younger. <\/p>\n Ann\u2019s ribbon seems to be white, Sheena\u2019s tartan; their hair, as far as we can see it in the black and white picture, and against the background of two of their brothers\u2019 dark pullovers, is curly or wavy. <\/p>\n Each has a striped collar on her blouse or dress, each has a woollen cardigan, and they are both smiling. We can consider this picture in the absence of another, the one Heaney is evoking in the beautiful poem about his sisters, Ribbons, which is published for the first time this week in The Poems of Seamus Heaney, and appears today in The Irish Times.<\/p>\n As so often in Heaney\u2019s poems, the reader of Ribbons is transported by the steady, illuminating work of his memory. We\u2019re in a school, a photographer is visiting and the girls are having their picture taken. <\/p>\n Both the formality of the occasion and the preciousness of the memory are anticipated by the repeated opening of the first two stanzas, \u201cIn the name of\u2026\u201d, suggesting the familiar ritual gesture of the sign of the cross and, more distantly, the portentous opening of the 1916<\/a> Proclamation. <\/p>\n The things invoked in the poem are more real, more ordinary, and so more intimately known than the Holy Trinity or the dead generations. But because this is a poem about children, we remember the all-consuming importance a favourite colour, or a particular garment, or a certain way of wearing your hair can assume, when you are very young. <\/p>\n Gently, the colours Heaney names in the opening lines begin the movement between youth and age that the poem enacts throughout: the gemstone shades of emerald and ruby seem altogether more grown-up than the cornflower blue and primrose that recall the hedges, meadows and roadside flowers Heaney, and presumably also his sisters, passed on the walk from Mossbawn, their first home, to Anahorish School. <\/p>\n The photographer emerges like a monster from a nonsense poem, with his \u201cplaited retractable snout\u201d and five legs: odd, and threatening, but still spouting the familiar patter deemed necessary to get each child to sit still and then move on. <\/p>\n Not unusually for Heaney, when the children emerge, the reader feels what he called in A Kite for Michael and Christopher, his immortal poem for his sons, \u201cthe strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief\u201d. For an adult, an encounter with a school photograph has the potential to activate the contrast between innocence and experience in a uniquely concentrated way. <\/p>\n Looking back in Ribbons, the older brother imagines the steadfast solidarity of his sisters, seen first withstanding the immediate instructions of the photographer, then cut adrift but still together in that forlorn image of them as orphans on a ship, then somehow transcending, going \u201cbeyond the pale\u201d, of their future selves. <\/p>\n He gives us other versions of endurance, too: the \u201cimmutable\u201d roughcast school wall, the \u201cclassic Fair Isle\u201d pattern and the copperplate script in which their names are written. <\/p>\n [\u00a0Seamus Heaney, by Fintan O\u2019Toole: His death 10 years ago was \u2018the end of a great eloquence\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n In the last four lines of the poem, Heaney pulls us back with a swift dismissal of those intimations of what lies ahead for the girls: yes, we might see and contemplate \u201cAll that\u201d, but what we really ought to see is right in front of us, in the instant of the photograph\u2019s taking, \u201cthe strictly tied bows\u201d in his sisters\u2019 hair, each girl with one arm around the other. That\u2019s what is irrecoverable; that is what this poem \u201csaves as well as shows\u201d, to borrow Heaney\u2019s own words about what poetry can do, in answer to O\u2019Driscoll\u2019s first question in Stepping Stones.<\/p>\n This poem was probably written in the late 1990s, before the publication of Heaney\u2019s 10th volume of poems, Electric Light, in 2001. It appears in The Poems of Seamus Heaney as one of several previously unpublished works selected by the poet\u2019s family. These in turn join some 200 previously published poems that are collected in this book for the first time, alongside the 12 volumes of poems Heaney published with Faber, and Stations, a volume of prose poems he brought out with Ulsterman Publications in 1975. <\/p>\n![\"Nobel](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/X2SFAH5HO5A25KL446QA753JCE.jpg\")
Nobel Prize winning poet Seamus Heaney. Photograph: Louis Quail\/In Pictures Ltd\/Corbis via Getty Images <\/p>\n