A line from Seamus Heaney's poem 'The Gravel Walks' was inscribed on his headstone earlier this week.
Heaney's grave, was marked with the line "walk on air, against your better judgement", which the poet chose to quote in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1995.
In 2008, Heaney was asked why he had chosen that particular line for the speech, and he stated that the name of the poem was similar to that of a popular traditional Irish reel, but that it also reflected the "in-betweenness of up and down, of being on the earth and of the heavens. I think that's where poetry should dwell, between the dream world and the given world, because you don't just want photography, and you don't want fantasy either."
The line comes from the final stanza of the poem 'The Gravel Walks', which reads:
So walk on air against your better judgement
Establishing yourself somewhere in between
Those solid batches mixed with grey cement
And a tune called The Gravel Walks that conjures green.
Heaney passed away in August of 2013 at the age of 74, and is buried in Bellaghy, Co. Derry which was his birthplace and the inspiration for much of his early work.
Via Independent.ie
