Elegy For a Stillborn Child written by
Seamus Heaney
Seamus Justin Heaney (; 13 April 1939 – 30 August 2013) was an Irish poet, playwright and translator. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. is a
poem
Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings in ...
about the death of his friend's
stillborn child.
It deals with the sad eventful
death
Death is the irreversible cessation of all biological functions that sustain an organism. For organisms with a brain, death can also be defined as the irreversible cessation of functioning of the whole brain, including brainstem, and brain ...
of the baby and how the mother and father react to the traumatic event as well as Seamus Heaney himself. The poem was published c. 1966 along with others such as ''Triptych for the Easter Battlers'', ''Homage to Pieter Breughel'', ''Persephone'', ''Rookery'', ''Requiem for the Irish Rebels'', ''The Peninsula'', and ''Orange Drums, Tyrone 1966''.
References
{{Irish poetry
Irish poems
Stillbirth