Requiem for the Croppies by Seamus Heaney
The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley…
No kitchens on the run, no striking camp…
We moved quick and sudden in our own country.
The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp.
A people hardly marching… on the hike…
We found new tactics happening each day:
We’d cut through reins and rider with the pike
And stampede cattle into infantry,
Then retreat through hedges where cavalry must be thrown.
Until… on Vinegar Hill… the final conclave.
Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.
The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.
They buried us without shroud or coffin
And in August… the barley grew up out of our grave.
I can recite this sonnet to you, this blood poem, most of my people of humble means having come here on Famine Boats from Liverpool and Cork.
Vinegar Hill was the site of the final battle of the Irish Rebellion of 1798, one poorly led, the Irish mere pawns of Napoleon, but the peasants, sick of British gall and oppression revolted and were crushed.
Heaney captures the voice of one of the Croppies*, the thrill of revolt and success, of being on the striking end, and finally, the thrill of becoming a part of “we’. The reader knows what’s coming though. The tragedy is always waiting deep in the poem, the ‘yet’ or ‘but’ or ‘except’, that wheel of a word that turns you toward the crusher. Here it comes with “until”.
The terrible contrast of scythes and cannon, the mass burial pit implied in “buried without shroud or coffin” or rites or names or stones or crosses, that which Heaney leaves unsaid but understood, and the final symmetry of barley, the course food of the poor, being their only markers.
I love this poem about a disastrous battle. It is wonderfully made — compact, each line well balanced, each image carrying a wealth of associations. It fits to the mouth. When I recite it, it comes quick, the voice of a survivor, one of the “us” who lived but who still lives with the dead.
In my heart I’ve always felt more deeply the tragic temperament of the world, more so than the comic or ironic or romantic, even though I love laughter and will play the fool to lighten a room. I don’t know why this is so. My life, unlike my father’s and mother’s has been fortunate, sleek in its luck and gifts. “Requiem” caught me the first time I found it, turning the page, beginning to read it aloud half-way through, feeling the rhythm. I remember the thrill of it, my wonder at its integrity and perfection and how Heaney setting this down could move me so, a young man far away, unknown to him.
*An Irishman who kept his hair cropped short was thought to be sympathetic to the ideals and goals of the French Revolution.
