Wedding Day

Heaney harks back to his Wedding Day in August 1965 when he married Marie Devlin; they have been married for nearly fifty years when the poet dies in 2013. Heaney’s day of celebration is filled with anxiety: I am afraid. Silence reigns (Sound has stopped in the day), replaced by a cascade of wedding ‘visuals’ (the images reel over/ And over). Heaney is puzzled as to why (when the Devlin family had not so much lost a daughter as gained a son) his abiding memory should be of all those tears, as to why his father-in-law’s emotions as betrayed by his countenance (The wild grief on his face /Outside the taxi?) fail to differentiate between a short honeymoon and total […]