What is the meaning of this poem by Irish poet Seamus Heaney?
Seamus Heaney’s poem, From The Republic of Conscience,was written to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Amnesty International. Heaney’s poem is published on the recent Ambassador of Conscience Award website as the central inspiration for a new award. The poem creates an imagined or virtual space through the language of myth and symbol which provides ethical affiliation across region and country around principled values and beliefs about human rights. (Activists Without Borders). In this poem Heaney experiments with a form which he has not used much before: the allegory or parable. As he himself declares, ‘Conscience is a republic, a silent, solitary place where a person would find it hard to avoid self-awareness and self-examination; and this made me think of Orkney. I remembered the silence the first time I landed there. When I got off the small propeller plane and started walking across the grass to a little arrivals hut, I heard the cry of a curlew……….. able to proceed with a
