Exploring the Poem

Requiem for the Croppies

The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley -
No kitchens on the run, no striking camp -
We moved quick and sudden in our own country
The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp.

A people, hardly marching - on the hike -
We found new tactics happening each day:
We'd cut through reins and rider with the pike
And stampede cattle into infantry,
Then retreat through hedges where cavalry must be thrown.

Until, on Vinegar Hill, the fatal conclave.
Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.
The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.
They buried us without shroud or coffin
And in August the barley grew up out of the grave.

• Heaney tells the story of the 1798 rebellion though the voice of a random dead croppy boy and, therefore, the rebel's point of view.

• The poem is written in sonnet form - 14 lines - but with no division into stanzas.

• The poem describes the struggle the Irish rebels had to undergo.

• Heaney focuses on the old-fashioned weapons - pike, scythes - the rebels used.

• The rebels also used herds of cattle to stampede into the lines of British solders.

• The poem shows how the rebels used clever tactics to attack the superior army.

• The rebels included priests, tramps, and farmers.

• A priest, Father John Murphy, led the rebellion in Wexford.

• The first line and the last line both mention barley, the food that sustained the rebels and grew out of their unmarked graves.

• The setting of the last lines of the poem is Vinegar Hill where the rebels were defeated. Vinegar Hill in Wexford was the site of the battle in which the rebels were defeated.

• By describing the hillside as "blushing", Heaney expresses the vast amount of blood that was shed

• The rebels who died were buried without a coffin or even a shroud.

Requiem for the Croppies was written in 1966 on the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising of 1916. As Neil Corcoran says in his student guide Seamus Heaney (Faber and Faber); "Heaney celebrates not the Rising itself but what he considers its original seed in the rebellion of 1798." The poem was printed in his second collection Door into the Dark. Heaney has written about the origins of the poem on many occasions and some of these comments are contained in the Responses page.

On the last day of the last century (31st December 1999) The Irish Times published a list of the 100 Favourite Irish Poems of all time. More than 3,500 readers of the paper had written or e-mailed their choices. Requiem for the Croppies was one of ten Seamus Heaney poems to appear on this list.