Hope and History: The Other Seamus Chimes In
Joe Biden is not the first U.S. President to quote those richly resonant lines from Seamus Heaney’s play The Cure at Troy (a version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes) that suggest how “once in a lifetime / The longed-for tidal wave / Of justice can rise up, / And hope and history rhyme.” That distinction belongs to Bill Clinton. The date was November 30th, 1995. Clinton was in Ireland to deliver a now-famous address to the citizens of Londonderry (a.k.a. Derry) in Northern Ireland. The next afternoon, he echoed those lines in remarks to a cheering crowd of 80,000 gathered in Dublin’s College Green. Later that day, while in the midst of packing their bags for the Nobel Prize ceremonies in Stockholm, Heaney and his wife Marie were invited to a brief private audience with Clinton and his wife at the American Ambassador’s residence in Dublin. In Stepping Stones, his memoiresque volume of interviews published in 2008, Heaney recalls the occasion and the circumstances:
Earlier in the day, the president quoted that line from The Cure at Troy about hope and history rhyming, so I’d brought along a handwritten copy of the stanza for him, and a copy of the published play for Hillary, inscribed with lines from the final chorus — ‘Now it’s high watermark / And floodtide in the heart / And time to go,’ and so on. So Marie and I go home and are watching the speeches from Dublin Castle on the television when suddenly Bill uses those same lines as his own peroration and farewell.
As journalist Darach Ó Séaghdha has noted, Irish President Mary Robinson quoted the line about hope and history almost a full five years before Clinton in her inauguration address in December of 1991, a couple of months after The Cure at Troy was premiered by the Field Day Theatre Company in the Guildhall in Derry. Evidently, however, Clinton’s championing of Heaney’s felicitous turn of phrase helped to plant the notion of the rhyming of hope and history in a wider public forum, and it has clearly bloomed since then in the political imagination as slogan and mantra, soundbite and meme.
But hearing Biden speak Heaney’s words in his inauguration speech (and several times earlier too — most notably in his nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in August of 2020) and reading that he once explained his love of Irish poetry as deriving not from his being of Irish descent but from his belief that the Irish are “the best poets,” I was reminded of another poetic engagement with history by another Irish writer who is inextricably associated with Seamus Heaney. In fact, in his remembrance (published in The New Yorker in 2000) of his long and deep friendship with Heaney — from boyhood into adulthood, and their overlapping professional lives as leading Irish men of letters — Seamus Deane accepts how his own identity became complicated after his half-namesake’s rising literary celebrity made their common first name “rhyme with ‘famous’”: “Then the name Seamus was his in a special way. I became Seamus eile — Irish for ‘the other Seamus.’ A nice qualifier. Otherhood via brotherhood.”
Actually, Seamus Deane is famous in his own right as one of Ireland’s foremost public intellectuals of the past half-century. As a literary critic and scholar, he is the author of a shelf of essential books on Irish literature and the emergence of the Irish nation, on Edmund Burke, and on the French enlightenment. Plus he was general editor of the massive three-volume Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing published in 1990. He is also the author of Reading in the Dark (1996), an utterly riveting novel of family secrets set in the Bogside, Derry’s predominantly Catholic and fervently nationalist enclave, over a period of about a quarter-century beginning in the 1940s. (The novel won a number of major literary awards and has been translated into more than 20 languages.) And between 1972 and 1983 he authored three standalone books of poems; his Selected Poems was published in 1988 by Gallery Press.
A specific poem of Deane’s that I think of relative to Heaney’s “hope and history” is the title poem of his third volume, History Lessons (1983). Widely anthologized, “History Lessons” begins with a quotation that mostly explains itself: “‘The proud and beautiful city of Moscow / Is no more.’ So wrote Napoleon to the Czar.” The uninitiated reader might appreciate knowing that Deane is translating a letter from Napoleon I to Alexander I in September of 1812 in which the Emperor laments the burning of Moscow by Count Rostopchin ahead of the arrival of the invading French army. That same reader might also appreciate knowing that the poem’s dedication to Irish fiction writer Ronan Sheehan and Irish philosopher Richard Kearney (now a distinguished faculty member at Boston College) intimates how the poem was sparked by a two-week trip to the Soviet Union the three men took in 1981. Writing about that trip a couple of years later in The Crane Bag, a journal he co-edited with Sheehan and Deane, Kearney elucidates how the purpose of their visit was to observe up-close the practical workings of Soviet Communism.
For Deane, the takeaway went beyond reportage, and that quotation from Napoleon remains attached to the moment he first heard it:
It was a November morning when we came
On this. I remember the football pitches
Beyond, stretched into wrinkles by the frost.
Someone was running across them, late for school,
His clothes scattered open by the wind.
Comprising five seven-line free-verse stanzas, the poem proceeds first with Deane’s appreciation of Moscow as a place where history is brought to life by vividly recounted details of how both Napoleonic and Hitlerian offensives were thwarted: “The firegold city was burning / In the Kremlin domes, a sabred Wehrmacht / Lay opened to the bone . . .” Tellingly, however, Deane concludes the second stanza not with a contemplation of the “official” history of the city, inevitably propagandistic, but with a fixation on what his own eye witnessed: “Still that boy was running.”
Introducing a selection of Irish short stories in 1891, W. B. Yeats wrote: “The history of a nation is not in parliaments or battle-fields, but in what people say to each other on fair-days and high days, and in how they farm, and quarrel, and go on pilgrimage.” As the third stanza of “History Lessons” makes clear, that running boy triggers in Deane a similarly immediate sense of place and time in relation to how “history” is conventionally defined, as visiting Pavlovsk, long associated with the Czars, and the Russian Orthodox religious center of Zagorsk (which Kearney recalls colorfully), the speaker in the poem feels the exotic becoming familiar: “Fragrance of Christ, as in the whitethorn / Brightening through Lent.” Ultimately, in his description of “this coal-smoke in the sunlight / Stealing over frost, houses huddled up in / Droves, deep drifts of lost // People,” the speaker is transported back to his native Northern Ireland. The poem pivoting on the double line break at the end of the stanza, suddenly those “lost // People” are the poet’s own people. “This was history,” Deane writes matter-of-factly at the start of the fourth stanza.
But as he goes on to mention, the history lessons taught for the State Exam for schoolboys in Northern Ireland, a province of the United Kingdom, confined Irish subject matter to the age of parliamentarian Henry Grattan around the time of the Act of Union in 1800. Describing how he brought back “Black gladioli bulbs from Samarkand / To flourish like omens in our cooler air” — “Coals ripening in a light white as vodka” — Deane testifies to how their fate became symbolic of how history is not just learned but lived. A dozen or so years before President Clinton would speak Heaney’s propitious lines outside the Guildhall in Derry, Deane inscribes the sectarian strife of his native city: “Elections, hunger-strikes and shots // Greeted our return. Houses broke open / In the season’s heat and the bulbs / Burned in the ground.”
Closing the final stanza of “History Lessons” by eliding Moscow in 1812 and the fiery socio-political climate of Derry in the early 1980s, Deane could be nodding toward the concept of “history repeating itself with a difference” that James Joyce has his narrator muse on in the “Ithaca” episode of Ulysses:
The city is no more. The lesson’s learned.
I will remember it always as a burning
In the heart of winter and a boy running.
Obviously, hope and history did not rhyme in Northern Ireland at the time of Deane’s writing of his poem.
By 1990, the climate was still explosive, but four years later, after the Provisional Irish Republican Army announced a cessation of paramilitary hostilities in the North, Heaney himself clarified what “hope” meant to him: “It is a state of the soul rather than a response to the evidence. It is not the expectation that things will turn out successfully but the conviction that something is worth working for, however it turns out.” In Stepping Stones, he speaks directly to the import of his lines from The Cure at Troy: “I was grateful to see those lines enter the language of the peace process, but very aware that they belonged in the realm of pious aspiration.” That aspiration would be realized formally with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in April of 1998, the culmination of talks and negotiations moderated by U. S. Senator George Mitchell at the behest of President Clinton. For all who quote those lines about hope and history rhyming, Presidents included, there is a lesson to be learned about the work to be done to achieve their promise of a higher good. Both Heaney and “the other Seamus” would no doubt concur with an observation by eminent Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert: “It is vanity to think one can influence the course of history by writing poetry. It is not the barometer that changes the weather.”
Thomas O’Grady was born and grew up on Prince Edward Island. He retired in December of 2019 after 35½ years as Director of Irish Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he was also Professor of English and a member of the Creative Writing faculty. His articles, essays, and reviews on literary and cultural matters have been published in a wide variety of scholarly journals and general-interest magazines, and his poems and short fiction have been published in literary journals and magazines on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border and on both sides of the Atlantic. His two books of poems — What Really Matters and Delivering the News — were published in the Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series by McGill-Queen’s University Press. He is currently Scholar-in-Residence at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana.