Seamus Heaney's "Three-Piece Suit"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 27 April 2022

⏱️ 8 minutes

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Summary

Seamus Justin Heaney MRIA (/ˈʃeɪməs ˈhiːni/; 13 April 1939 – 30 August 2013) was an Irish poet, playwright and translator. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature.[1][2] Among his best-known works is Death of a Naturalist (1966), his first major published volume. Heaney was and is still recognised as one of the principal contributors to poetry in Ireland during his lifetime. American poet Robert Lowell described him as "the most important Irish poet since Yeats", and many others, including the academic John Sutherland, have said that he was "the greatest poet of our age".[3][4]Robert Pinsky has stated that "with his wonderful gift of eye and ear Heaney has the gift of the story-teller."[5] Upon his death in 2013, The Independent described him as "probably the best-known poet in the world".[6]

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0:00.0	Welcome back to The Daily Poem, which is produced by Goldberry Studios. I'm David Kern, and today is Wednesday, April 27, 2022.
0:08.7	And today's poem is by Seamus Heaney, one of my favorite poets. He, of course, is an Irish poet, playwright, and translator who received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature, and lived from April 13th to 1939 to August of 2013.
0:23.5	Not that I ever need an excuse to share a Seamus Heaney poem,
0:27.4	but his birthday being in April makes it almost a necessity.
0:31.5	So I wanted to share a poem that is a little less known,
0:34.9	one is, you know, lesser known compared to a lot of his other work.
0:37.8	It's called three-piece.
0:39.4	It's not surprisingly a three-part poem.
0:42.9	It was originally published in 1997 in poetry magazine.
0:47.9	It goes like this.
0:48.8	One.
0:49.8	A suit.
0:52.1	I'll make you one, he said, and balance it perfectly on you.
0:56.6	And I could almost feel the plum line of the crease to eat my heel, my shoulders
1:00.4	like a spar or a riding scale under the jacket.
1:04.4	My whole shape realigned in ways that suited me down to the ground.
1:09.8	So although a suit was the last thing that I needed, I wore his words and told him that
1:14.5	I'd take it and told myself it was going for a song.
1:20.4	Two.
1:22.0	A tie.
1:23.7	She made me one of hard silk thread, string thin, tight skein, tight skein, crocheted by hand, close-knit and strict as singhaned, all a glitter like rain on fern, or emerald elms of fine ground jade, my thin green line for which I gratius aago in Latin quotes with gender change in subject and tense
1:45.8	change in verb. Nihil tajit, quote known or not, and translate thus, to tie the knot, she puts
	...

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