Seamus Heaney's Poem about the Blasket Islands (County Kerry)

"The Given Note"

Heaney's poem "The Given Note" - about the Blasket fiddler who retrieves the mysterious Port na bPúcaí (The Fairies' Tune) from Inisvicillane - is the conceptual touchstone or fulcrum for this music. The poem's fiddler becomes a metaphor for the poet himself, for his seeing and hearing of the beauties, ordinary and extraordinary mysteries of the world. The fiddler's grave rephrasing of the tune becomes Heaney's translation into poetry of the "loud weather" of this world and human nature. The music moves between the seen and the translated, offering a homage to the beauties of each and to the fiddler who moves between them.

Rachel Holstead 2009

The Given Note

On the most westerly Blasket
In a dry-stone hut
He got this air out of the night.

Strange noises were heard
By others who followed, bits of a tune
Coming in on loud weather

Though nothing like melody.
He blamed their fingers and ear
As unpractised, their fiddling easy

For he had gone alone into the island
And brought back the whole thing.
The house throbbed like his full violin.

So whether he calls it spirit music
Or not, I don't care. He took it
Out of wind off mid-Atlantic.

Still he maintains, from nowhere.
It comes off the bow gravely,
Rephrases itself into the air.


Seamus Heaney
from the collection 'Opened Ground, Poems 1966-1996', published by Faber and Faber 1998 

This poem was recited at Seamus Heaney's funeral yesterday.