A friend who realised his destiny in full

Recently I spoke in Enniskillen at the Happy Days Beckett festival, an event Seamus would have loved for its generosity of spirit. He, like myself, emerged from a riven Ulster, and the Methodist and Union Halls, Anglican cathedral, Roman Catholic church and even PSNI station of the town all turned into a vast theatre would have amused him greatly.

My talk was moderated by Seamus’s son Michael (this newspaper’s radio critic), who has inherited not just his father’s laughing eyes of a striking dark brown unusual in Ireland but also his considerable charm. He was a lively and intelligent moderator, but afterwards he expressed concern to my wife, Elizabeth, about his father, who was in hospital, just for observation since he had bruised his head in a fall. But Seamus had been looking more and more fragile lately, almost a ghost of himself, and so both Elizabeth and I were concerned.

Still, in the way of these things, we were not prepared for the blow when it arrived, and I reproach myself for my reluctance to read the signs in his very rueful last volume, Human Chain, where, again and again, he returns to the wakehouse and the graveyard: "When the funeral bell tolls / The grass is all a-tremble."

In the fine sequence Route 110 he evokes the atmosphere of rural almost-gaiety after a funeral: "The corpse house then a house of hospitalities / Right through the small hours, the ongoing card game / Interrupted constantly by rounds / Of cigarettes on plates, biscuits, cups of tea, / The antiphonal recital of known events / And others rare, clandestine, undertoned."

Later he writes with a kind of barely suppressed angry lyricism about, presumably, the victims of local violence: “. . .bodies / Unglorified, accounted for and bagged / Behind the grief cordons: not to be laid / In war graves with full honours, nor in a separate plot / Fired over on anniversaries / By units drilled and spruce and unreconciled.”

Seamus's death comes, strangely enough, as we are still mourning the loss of the meticulous, industrious, eccentric and eminently generous Dennis O'Driscoll, whose series of interviews, published as Stepping Stones, are the best guide we have yet to the heart of Heaney. He was not Seamus's Boswell, however, but more of a confidant.

While Seamus seemed to be encased in courtesy like a medieval knight, he also relished what the Scots call flytings. Hugh MacDiarmid, for example, loved Norman MacCaig, but to hear their banter you would think they were enemies. To appreciate a bullseye scored against oneself was part of the game, and Seamus, for all his gravitas, had a frisky and wry sense of humour.

Once, walking in winter after an Irish Academy of Letters meeting, I remarked on his voluminous new overcoat, with a bright scarf at the throat, “Lord, Seamus! You’re beginning to look like a bishop.” He trumped me easily: “Why stop there?” he said with a grin.

When asked to pronounce on Seamus’s death, a phrase coalesced in my mind: he did his work. That may sound like I was suggesting he wrote poems as if stoically or doggedly completing a job of work. But what I meant is that he realised his destiny. A gift and the fulfilment of its promise, the rounding out of a career, is a rare thing, but Seamus achieved it. And another phrase occurred to me, from Milton: “Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail.”

Destiny is to some degree bound up with geography, at least for poets of Northern rural background like Seamus and myself. I grew up in the rough hinterland of Tyrone, at the edge of the Clogher Valley. My literary imagination was influenced by the ghost of William Carleton, and I attended the junior seminary at Armagh in wartime, whereas Seamus lived along the Bann with its eel fisheries, and went to school at St Columb's, alongside Brian Friel, John Hume, Seamus Deane and Phil Coulter. (It has been suggested that they put something in the water at St Columb's, to produce such formidable Irishmen.) My part of Tyrone was smouldering, while Seamus's part of Derry was fairly placid, and this I suppose accounts for some of the differences in our verse, those 19th-century categories like "Fenian" or "AOH".

But when I first met Seamus, he gave me a book on the '98 Rebellion, which had inspired his Requiem for the Croppies, whereas I was back with the O'Neills, and a family legend that one of my ancestors had offered hospitality to the soon-to-be deposed James Stuart on his way to the Siege of Derry. From such frail conduits can poetry spring, but there was also the next football match.

Yet soon history would bear hard on us, from Bloody Sunday to the Omagh bombing, but before all that there was an all-too-brief period of bliss in Belfast, when Michael Emmerson's Belfast Festival was up and running. It was there I first heard the lyric triumvirate of Heaney, Derek Mahon and Michael Longley, later joined by Jimmy Simmons. Seán Ó Riada was named composer of the year, enchanting all with his double gift of classical and Irish music.

This was the rollicking background of the early Heaney, although his titles were sombre: Death of a Naturalist (1966) and Door into the Dark (1969). He and Marie, his wife, had found a fine house near Lavery's in Ashley Avenue, not far from the university at which he had begun to lecture. But before long the atmosphere in the North would darken. Seamus remains haunted, in his last book, by a terrible thing that happened on his own street, and he continues to wonder: "And what in the end was there left to bury / Of Mr Lavery, blown up in his own pub / As he bore the primed device and bears it still . . ."

At the time, Seamus agonised over that incident in a poem, of which he sent me several revisions, with the crucial line “We petrify or uproot now.”

And so they came south, where they created islands of graciousness in Dublin and Wicklow, and where Seamus refined and burnished his poetic gift. As I wrote of him in the Dublin Literary Review, "Like Hopkins, he is a mystic of the ordinary, which he renders extraordinary." The microscopic intensity of his gaze, coupled with the magnanimity of his vision, created poems of singular power. And people will miss the warm, friendly voice with which he read them.

Not long ago, after Iraq, after Afghanistan, Seamus remarked to me in a letter that the world had turned into “a big Ulster”. So our own legacy of conflict and woe had spread across the globe. Yet one hopes the poet speaks to the conscience of peoples, speaks a truth that can heal, and redeem.