This was clearly a useful way of being possessed. It was the lens through which Mr. Longley examined the Northern Irish situation.
He “had an uncanny ability to allow myths that might have seemed less than pertinent to be tellingly on point, particularly in his many repurposings of Homer,” the poet Paul Muldoon wrote in the foreword to Mr. Longley’s 2024 poetry collection, “Ash Keys.”
One such repurposing was Mr. Longley’s most famous poem, “Ceasefire,” written in 1994 and published in The Irish Times soon after the Provisional I.R.A. cease-fire. It compares a profoundly emotional scene from the “Iliad” — Troy’s King Priam pleading with his son Hector’s killer, the Greek warrior Achilles, for the return of Hector’s body — to the reconciliation of enemies during the Northern Ireland peace talks. It begins:
Put in mind of his own father and moved to tears
Achilles took him by the hand and pushed the old king
Gently away, but Priam curled up at his feet and
Wept with him until their sadness filled the building.
“It’s a public poem,” Mr. Muldoon said in an interview. “It’s the kind of poem that Longley, like most people writing lyrically, wouldn’t have necessarily been planning to write early in his career. In many ways, he would have been more comfortable writing about the birds, beasts and flowers. But it’s very hard to be from that part of the world and not be a public poet.”
Mr. Longley included flowers in another public poem about the Troubles, “The Ice-Cream Man.” It begins with these lines:
Rum and raisin, vanilla, butter-scotch, walnut, peach:
You would rhyme off the flavours. That was before
They murdered the ice-cream man on the Lisburn road
And you bought carnations to lay outside his shop.
His subjects were consequential — love, nature and the nature of man — but Mr. Longley’s poems could have hardly been less Homeric in length. “Ceasefire,” for example, unspools in 14 trim lines: three quatrains and a couplet.
