'Catch the heart off guard and blow it open'

The world lost a great poet today, and one who's words touched my life.

I was a 19-year-old student studying abroad in the United Kingdom. It was a cloudy, misty day in Ireland, and we stopped the bus by the sea. Professor Becknell read us a poem from Seamus Heaney that has echoed in my head all these years...

Postscript

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

(from The Spirit Level)


Find videos of Seamus Heaney reading aloud 11 of his poems here:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/ailbhemalone/videos-of-seamus-heaney-reading-his-poems-aloud