Seamus Heaney, Poète

Front Liners, High Commissioner, representatives of the UN, workers for human rights: I am honoured to be here to read the poem “From the Republic of Conscience”. I was invited by Mary Lawlor and she had every right to invite me because without her it would not have been written. She asked me some years ago in the late 80’s to write something to celebrate United Nations Day and the work of Amnesty and this poem resulted. This morning, however, I though I might also quote some other verses (not my own), tell a story and then read the poem. The verses come from Dante's Inferno, and I'll quote them first in Italian: Considerate la vostra semenza: fatte non foste a vivere come bruti ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza. (Inferno, XXVI 118-120)

These are the words of the Greek hero Ulysses. He is telling Dante about his final fatal voyage, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, beyond the borders of the known world, and remembering the words he used to persuade his comrades to join him in this ultimate heroic endeavour: Consider your origins. Living like a brute is not the destiny for men like you but knowledge and virtue ever our pursuit.

Thanks to this episode in Dante's poem, Ulysses has become one of the world's great symbols of human dignity and human resource, a representative of the human compulsion to follow knowledge and transcend the boundaries of pettiness and self-interest. And Ulysses goes on to tell Dante of the courage that was required to initiate and pursue his adventure; I set forth then upon the open sea with just one vessel from my fleet's remains and those few men who had not deserted me.

It seems right to quote these lines on this occasion. In the presence of so many workers in the field of human rights, so many people who have faced danger, who have not deserted their values but have stayed faithful to their brave purpose, the words of Ulysses sound forth with special resonance. Through a hundred thousand dangers we have steered, my brothers, I said, to reach these western gates....

So let us not forswear or fail our fates but embrace experience, tracing the sun's route to the uninhabited region that awaits.

Consider your origins. Living like a brute is not the destiny of men like you but knowledge and virtue ever our pursuit."

With these few words of mine. my shipmates grew so eager to go on that even I could not have stopped them had I wanted to.

These stanzas could be the anthem for all defenders of human rights, for all those who would remind power of its abuses, all who would proclaim the good news that "living like a brute is not the destiny of men", nor the destiny of women. The one who speaks the lines stands on the edge of the unknown and in doing so he stands for the bravery of everyone else who goes beyond the common consensus, who chooses to break out. He stands for those whom Mary Lawlor referred to earlier in her courageous and stirring statement, those brave and noble ones who, as she rightly said, step outside of themselves.

Before I read my own poem, therefore, it may be worthwhile to recall another moment when these lines of Dante's were quoted in order to fortify the human spirit at a dark moment. In his magnificent account of his year in Auschwitz, Primo Levi tells of a sunlit morning when he walked through that hellish landscape trying to teach another prisoner some Italian. What Levi finds himself remembering is Ulysses' speech, in particular the lines I quoted at the beginning: Considerate la vostra semenza: fatte non foste a vivere come bruti ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza.

(Consider your origins. Living like a brute is not the destiny of men like you but knowledge and virtue ever our pursuit.)

Out of the depths of the degradation forced upon them by their Nazi captors the two men climb up the ladder of Dante's rhyming stanzas, back towards their proper dignity. It is a very beautiful illustration of how a writer's work can help the human to defend itself in the midst of the vilest desecration, and I mention it in order to show that the good work of poetry is all of a piece with the beautiful and necessary work done by you who are assembled in this hall this morning.

My own poem is a small attempt to show solidarity with that work. It means to suggest that we must not waver in our trust in our inherited human values, that we must credit the rightness of our intuitions and know that we are called upon to keep faith with every good impulse. We must not forget the call of conscience and we must endeavour to keep others awake to it.

The speaker of the poem is an ordinary guy who ends up in this imaginary place, the republic of conscience. Everything and everybody he encounters brings him back to primary values, everything seems a reminder of the necessity for probity and integrity in individual and civic life. And at the same time, it's all like a dream to him. But it is nevertheless a dream that must be read for its true meanings:

I When I landed in the republic of conscience it was so noiseless when the engines stopped I could hear a curlew high above the runway.

At immigration, the clerk was an old man who produced a wallet from his homespun coat and showed me a photograph of my grandfather.

The woman in customs asked me to declare the words of our traditional cures and charms to heal dumbness and avert the evil eye.

No porters. No interpreter. No taxi. You carried your own burden and very soon your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared.

II Fog is a dreaded omen there but lightning spells universal good and parents hang swaddled infants in trees during thunderstorms.

Salt is their precious mineral. And seashells are held to the ear during births and funerals. The base of all inks and pigments is seawater

Their sacred symbol is a stylised boat. The sail is an ear, the mast a sloping pen, the hull a mouth-shape, the keel an open eye.

At their inauguration, public leaders must swear to uphold unwritten law and weep to atone for their presumption to hold office-

and to affirm their faith that all life sprang from salt in tears which the sky god wept after he dreamt his solitude was endless.

III I came back from that frugal republic with my two arms the one length, the customs woman having insisted my allowance was myself.

The old man rose and gazed into my face and said that was official recognition that I was now a dual citizen.

He therefore desired me when I got home to consider myself a representative and to speak on their behalf in my own tongue.

Their embassies, he said, were everywhere but operated independently and no ambassador would ever be relieved.