Traditions
By Seamus Heaney
For Tom Flanagan
I
Our guttural muse
was bulled long ago
by the alliterative tradition,
her uvula grows
vestigial, forgotten
like the coccyx
or a Brigid’s Cross
yellowing in some outhouse
while custom, that “most
sovereign mistress”,
beds us down into
the British isles.
II
We are to be proud
of our Elizabethan English:
“varsity”, for example,
is grass-roots stuff with us;
we “deem” or we “allow”
when we suppose
and some cherished archaisms
are correct Shakespearean.
Not to speak of the furled
consonants of lowlanders
shuttling obstinately
between bawn and mossland.
III
MacMorris, gallivanting
around the Globe, whinged
to courtier and groundling
who had heard tell of us
as going very bare
of learning, as wild hares,
as anatomies of death:
“What ish my nation?”
And sensibly, though so much
later, the wandering Bloom
replied, “Ireland,” said Bloom,
“I was born here. Ireland.”
