Ribbons by Seamus Heaney
Emerald, cornflower blue,
Ruby, primrose and white,
In the name of ringlets and curls,
Polka dots, partings and plaits
And double-tied bows . . .
To-day the photographer comes
With his tripod and cowl
And plaited retractable snout,
A five-legged beast
Of gesticulation and blather
They’ll outface together,
Steady and far off and solemn
As orphans posed at a rail
In the last days of sail,
Beyond the pale of the selves
They are due to become,
The one thing immutable still
The roughcast grey of the wall
Of the school, plus
The knitted classic Fair Isle
Patterns, plus their names on the roll
As transcribed on the slats of the bench,
In a copperplate hand –
All that, and the strictly tied bows,
And one right arm and one left,
Each placed to be seen round the other’s
Shoulder, as ordered.
Listen to Seamus Heaney’s Ribbons, read by Freya McClements
‘We’re in that cherished, reanimated territory of Heaney’s home ground’
- By Dr Rosie Lavan
In a photograph of Seamus Heaney and four of his siblings as children, reproduced in Dennis O’Driscoll’s indispensable book Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (2008), the poet’s sisters, Sheena and Ann, have ribbons in their hair. The photograph is dated c1950, so Seamus would have been about 11 years old; the girls, who followed him immediately in the sequence of nine children of whom he was the eldest, a couple of years younger.
Ann’s ribbon seems to be white, Sheena’s tartan; their hair, as far as we can see it in the black and white picture, and against the background of two of their brothers’ dark pullovers, is curly or wavy.
Each has a striped collar on her blouse or dress, each has a woollen cardigan, and they are both smiling. We can consider this picture in the absence of another, the one Heaney is evoking in the beautiful poem about his sisters, Ribbons, which is published for the first time this week in The Poems of Seamus Heaney, and appears today in The Irish Times.
As so often in Heaney’s poems, the reader of Ribbons is transported by the steady, illuminating work of his memory. We’re in a school, a photographer is visiting and the girls are having their picture taken.
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Both the formality of the occasion and the preciousness of the memory are anticipated by the repeated opening of the first two stanzas, “In the name of…”, suggesting the familiar ritual gesture of the sign of the cross and, more distantly, the portentous opening of the 1916 Proclamation.
The things invoked in the poem are more real, more ordinary, and so more intimately known than the Holy Trinity or the dead generations. But because this is a poem about children, we remember the all-consuming importance a favourite colour, or a particular garment, or a certain way of wearing your hair can assume, when you are very young.
Gently, the colours Heaney names in the opening lines begin the movement between youth and age that the poem enacts throughout: the gemstone shades of emerald and ruby seem altogether more grown-up than the cornflower blue and primrose that recall the hedges, meadows and roadside flowers Heaney, and presumably also his sisters, passed on the walk from Mossbawn, their first home, to Anahorish School.
The photographer emerges like a monster from a nonsense poem, with his “plaited retractable snout” and five legs: odd, and threatening, but still spouting the familiar patter deemed necessary to get each child to sit still and then move on.
Not unusually for Heaney, when the children emerge, the reader feels what he called in A Kite for Michael and Christopher, his immortal poem for his sons, “the strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief”. For an adult, an encounter with a school photograph has the potential to activate the contrast between innocence and experience in a uniquely concentrated way.
Looking back in Ribbons, the older brother imagines the steadfast solidarity of his sisters, seen first withstanding the immediate instructions of the photographer, then cut adrift but still together in that forlorn image of them as orphans on a ship, then somehow transcending, going “beyond the pale”, of their future selves.
He gives us other versions of endurance, too: the “immutable” roughcast school wall, the “classic Fair Isle” pattern and the copperplate script in which their names are written.
In the last four lines of the poem, Heaney pulls us back with a swift dismissal of those intimations of what lies ahead for the girls: yes, we might see and contemplate “All that”, but what we really ought to see is right in front of us, in the instant of the photograph’s taking, “the strictly tied bows” in his sisters’ hair, each girl with one arm around the other. That’s what is irrecoverable; that is what this poem “saves as well as shows”, to borrow Heaney’s own words about what poetry can do, in answer to O’Driscoll’s first question in Stepping Stones.
This poem was probably written in the late 1990s, before the publication of Heaney’s 10th volume of poems, Electric Light, in 2001. It appears in The Poems of Seamus Heaney as one of several previously unpublished works selected by the poet’s family. These in turn join some 200 previously published poems that are collected in this book for the first time, alongside the 12 volumes of poems Heaney published with Faber, and Stations, a volume of prose poems he brought out with Ulsterman Publications in 1975.
As editors of this first comprehensive collected edition of Heaney’s poetry, our aim has been to trace in new detail the arc of his writing life, from the earliest poems he published as an undergraduate student at Queen’s University Belfast in the late 1950s, to those written in the years between the publication of his last volume, Human Chain, in 2010, and his death in 2013.
Some readers will have followed Heaney from the very beginning; many, we hope, will discover or rediscover him through this volume.
The poem looks forward from its long-past setting in the knowledge that the years ahead will not be undimmed by difficulty or loss
— Dr Rosie Lavan
In preparing it we have had the good fortune and the privilege to dwell with his poems in a full sense over a period of years, charting their publication histories and logging the minutiae of his revisions to them. We have been enlivened and sustained by the range of his vision and sympathies, and by the clarity of the words and images through which he chose to express them.
Here, in Ribbons, we’re in that cherished, reanimated territory of Heaney’s home ground: south Co Derry in the late 1940s or early 1950s. The poem looks forward from its long-past setting in the knowledge that the years ahead will not be undimmed by difficulty or loss. But Heaney also uses this poem, as he did many others, as a device to question the ways in which a poet’s effort to translate some true feeling into words might need to be diverted to capture what might otherwise have been, to borrow a phrase from another poem, “a missed trueness”, which is why he shifts our focus back to the ribbons in those closing lines.
Of course, what strikes any one of us as true in a work of art has as much to do with us as with the work itself.
In their moving study School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference (2020), Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer observe that, with the passage of time, “photographs keep developing in unforeseen directions when they are viewed and re-viewed by different people in different presents”. There is a beguiling analogy to be drawn with Heaney’s poetry and its readers.
Read and re-read by any one of us, the poems will keep developing, too.
Dr Rosie Lavan is Associate Professor at the School of English, Trinity College Dublin
Poem extracted from The Poems of Seamus Heaney by Seamus Heaney, edited by Rosie Lavan and Bernard O’Donoghue with Matthew Hollis, which will be published by Faber & Faber on October 9th, 2025
