Seamus Heaney       Traditions           for Tom Flanagan I Our guttural muse was bulled long ago by the alliterative tradition, her uvula grows vestigial, forgotten like the coccyx or a Brigid's Cross yellowing in some outhouse while custom, that "most sovereign mistress", beds us down into the British isles. II We are to be proud of our Elizabethan English: "varsity", for example, is grass-roots stuff with us; we "deem" or we "allow" when we suppose and some cherished archaisms are correct Shakespearean. Not to speak of the furled consonants of lowlanders shuttling obstinately between bawn and mossland. III MacMorris, gallivanting around the Globe, whinged to courtier and groundling who had heard tell of us as going very bare of learning, as wild hares, as anatomies of death: "What ish my nation?" And sensibly, though so much later, the wandering Bloom replied, "Ireland," said Bloom, "I was born here. Ireland." 1966