Identity area
Reference code
Title
Date(s)
- Twentieth Century (Creation)
Level of description
Extent and medium
Paper, ink. 29 x 21.5 cm
Context area
Name of creator
Biographical history
Archival history
11/05/2011
Content and structure area
Scope and content
Signed print of the poem Valedictory Verse by Seamus Heaney ‘composed for the Carysfort Graduation Exercises, 1988’ with an illustration of Carysfort College, Blackrock, Co. Dublin in the top right corner. Dated June 2011.
Séamus Heaney wrote this poem to mark “a significant moment in the history of Dublin” – the closure of Carysfort College in Blackrock. The Nobel-prize winning poet taught at the teacher-training college between 1975 and 1981, before he took up a position at Harvard. Carysfort was founded in 1877 as a college for Catholic girls who wished to become teachers. Other lecturers at the college included Éamon de Valera and Eoin MacNeill, co-founder of the Gaelic League and founder of the Irish Volunteers. The poem was written, as Heaney notes, “to mark the end of an era.”
