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Ireland mourned the loss of its Nobel laureate poet Seamus Heaney with equal measures of poetry and pain Monday in a funeral full of grace notes and a final message from the great man himself: Don't be afraid.
Among those packing the pews of Dublin's Catholic Church of the Sacred Heart were government leaders — from the Republic of Ireland as well as Northern Ireland — poets and novelists, Bono and The Edge from the rock band U2, and Brian Keenan, an Irish national abducted while teaching in Beirut in the 1980s and held hostage for four years.
Ireland's foremost uilleann piper, Liam O'Flynn, played a wailing lament before family members and friends offered a string of readings from the Bible and their own often-lyrical remembrances of the country's most celebrated writer of the late 20th century.
The 90-minute service ended with a cellist's rendition of the childhood bedtime classic, "Brahms's Lullaby."
Heaney won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1995 in recognition of his wide-ranging writings inspired by the rural wonders of Ireland, the strife of his native Northern Ireland, the ancient cultures of Europe, of Catholic faith and Celtic mysticism, and the immutability of family ties. He died Friday in a Dublin hospital at the age of 74.
Last words sent via text message
In a tribute delivered from the pulpit, one of Heaney's three children revealed his final words: a text message from his hospital bed to his wife, Marie.
Michael Heaney said the words, "written a few minutes before he passed away, were in his beloved Latin. And they read: 'Noli timere.' Don't be afraid." That revelation opened a ripple of tears in the audience, including from Marie and Heaney's only daughter, Catherine, in the front row beside the flower-topped coffin.
Heaney's sons, Michael and Christopher, and other relatives carried his coffin from the church. Outside, on a blustery but sunny day, hundreds spontaneously applauded as his casket emerged into the light.
One of the poets who read prayers to the mourners, Theo Dorgan, said many lovers of poetry worldwide had expected Heaney to live much longer, given his strong mind and masculine vigor. He noted that Heaney had resumed worldwide readings and seminars following a 2006 stroke.
"A great oak has fallen," Dorgan said in an interview. "A lot of people sheltered in the amplitude of the leaf and light and shade of the oak that was Seamus. He expanded our idea of what poetry is and can be."
Heaney's funeral cortege faced a several-hour drive north from Dublin to his family home in Bellaghy, a Northern Ireland village that was the fountainhead for much of his work. He was to be buried in the family plot in Bellaghy's cemetery.
Thousands queued to sign books of condolence opened Monday in Dublin, Belfast and the Northern Ireland city of Londonderry, where Heaney attended Catholic boarding school in the 1950s. On Sunday, a crowd of 80,000 observed a minute's silence and applauded the memory of Heaney at a Gaelic football match between Dublin and Kerry.
"I could talk until the cows come home about the minority status of Catholics in the North of Ireland. But that ground has been gone over a lot. I would say that the more important Catholic thing is the actual sense of eternal values and infamous vices which our education or formation gives us. There's a sense of profoundness, a sense that the universe can be ashimmer with something, and Catholicism - even if I don't like sentimentalizing it - was the backdrop to that whole thing. The world I grew up in offered me a sense that I was a citizen of the empyrean - the crystalline elsewhere of the world." Seamus Heaney, Nobel Laureate
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