'When a warrior is gone'... Seamus Heaney

GONE FAR TOO SOON: The master in 2009. Ah God, I thought we'd have Seamus Heaney for at least a few more years. The wispy white-haired Irish laureate died in Dublin today, at the age of 74, according to various media reports, and there are no words to properly express what he contributed to poetry and language during his immense career.

He was a makaris; an archeologist of peat bogs and Latinate etymology; a singer of old songs ("Antigone," "Beowulf," from Virgil) in a thrilling modern idiom... and on and on. He was a wonder.

I'm wrong about one thing, though. There ARE very good words appropriate for this moment of loss  -- his own, taken from his best-selling translation of "Beowulf":

It is always better to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning. For every one of us, living in this world means waiting for our end. Let whoever can win glory before death. When a warrior is gone, that will be his best and only bulwark.

He won plenty of glory, didn't he? I wonder if the thought ever crossed his mind, as he worked on these lines in his farmhouse years ago, that such words could apply to him and his career.

Rest in peace, old artificer.

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Leda and the New Testament?: new in bookstores

The Virgin Mother's been called some unusual things: I've heard her likened to the Egyptian goddess Isis. I've read comparisons of her to the Greek maiden Leda (both, the comparison goes, conceived after a divine encounter). I suppose I expected something just as startling or subversive in a new short book by Colm Toibin, "The Testament of Mary," published by Scribner this month.

In a way, this is just what happened - although not in the way that I expected.

Toibin gives us a portrait of the mother of Jesus in her heartbroken old age: living in Ephesus, visited (and harassed) by the Gospel writers who want her to corroborate the story of Jesus that they're writing. One of them scowls at her "when the story I tell him does not stretch to whatever limits he has ordained."

What does she think of her son's disciples?

They're nothing but "a group of misfits, who were only children like himself, or men without fathers, or men who could not look a woman in the eye."

This book started as a dramatic monologue performed before Dublin audiences, and all I could think was: Well, I wonder what people in the world's most Catholic nation think of this!

After all, Mary's not the figure of the Pieta, holding the body of her son after he is taken off the cross: She flees, terrified for her life.  There are many more provocative revelations -- but I won't spoil them -- all rendered in Toibin's characteristically beautiful, lyrical prose.

In the end, Toibin gives us a Mary who isn't Isis, or Leda. She's not a figure surrounded by stained-glass or stretching across the ceiling of countless church domes. Toibin's testament presents us with someone far more powerful and easier to understand: A mother. Toibin's Mary is human, all too human.

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