A poem for Harvard
Seamus Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1995. He was teaching at Harvard that year, as he had been, one way or another, since 1979. Today — bluff and kind and 73 — Heaney will be back at Harvard, on hand from Dublin to read a poem at Morning Exercises. As Harvard celebrates its 375th anniversary, he will reprise his 1986 “Villanelle for an Anniversary,” composed for the University’s 350th. The villanelle relies on the rhetorical power of repetition, in this case, alternate rhyming refrains lifted from the first stanza. “There’s a kind of bell-ringing quality to the villanelle,” said Heaney in a trans-Atlantic interview, “which makes it easy on the ear.” The 19-line anniversary poem has two repeated lines. The first is “A spirit moved. John Harvard walked the yard.” The second reads, “The books stood open and the gates unbarred.” Heaney remembered writing just two poems during his...