A Ship of Death
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- Genre/Type Descriptor(s)
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Poem or Poetry
Translation from Old English - Language(s)
- English
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- Author
- Heaney, Seamus
- Translator
- Heaney, Seamus
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- Contained in
- The Haw Lantern, by Seamus Heaney
- Location Details
- Page 20
- City
- London
- Publisher
- Faber & Faber
- Date
- 1987
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- Relationships
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Collocates with -> Holding Course, Heaney, Seamus (1987)Collocates with -> The Spoonbait, Heaney, Seamus (1987)Collocates with -> From the Land of the Unspoken, Heaney, Seamus (1987)(Downstream) Revised and incorporated into -> Beowulf, Heaney, Seamus (1999)
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- Identifying Numbers
- MO2 1987(c).
- Descriptive Notes
Book is x + 52 pp. "A Ship of Death" is a translation of Beowulf, ll. 26-52, presented as a lyric poem; it is part of a group of consecutive poems in The Haw Lantern ("From the Land of the Unspoken," "A Ship of Death," and "The Spoonbait") that reflect Heaney's close creative engagement with Beowulf. "A Ship of Death" was lightly revised for its inclusion in Heaney's Beowulf (1999).
The poem begins:
Scyld was still a strong man when his time came
and he crossed over into Our Lord's keeping.
His warrior band did what he bade them
when he laid down the law among the Danes (20)And ends:
No man can tell,
no wise man in the hall or weathered veteran
knows for certain who salvaged that load. (20)- Scholarship
• Floyd Collins, Seamus Heaney: The Crisis of Identity (University of Delaware Press, 2003), 162.
• Chris Jones, Strange Likeness: The Use of Old English in Twentieth-Century Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), chap. 4, "Old English Escape Routes: Seamus Heaney—The Caedmon of the North," esp. pp. 225–28.
- Authentication
BAM (from 1st U.S. edition, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1987).
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- Last Updated
- 03/26/2022