The border between the imaginable and the possible was eradicated when terror struck the US on September 11th, the poet and Nobel Laureate Prof Seamus Heaney said last night.
Delivering a lecture at the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland, Dublin, he said the search for words to put meaning on what happened was never greater than after the terrorist attacks.
He confessed that he "felt called" to do something and his response has been a poem, a translation from Latin of an Ode of Horace about the thunder god galloping through the clear blue sky which was written in the first century BC.
He quoted from it:
"Anything can happen,
The tallest things be overturned
Those in high places daunted
And the ignored regarded".
The poem, he said, was equal to a need people felt in the wake of the terrorist attacks - a need for words that would be equal to peoples' shock and bewilderment at having to live in a newly dangerous world.
Prof Heaney noted that when circumstances are at their most bewildering and overwhelming people often want "an articulation" that will act at "a momentary stay against confusion".
"This was never clearer than in the days following the attacks in New York and the Pentagon last September. There was a feeling that a crack had run through the foundations, that the roof had been blown off, that the border between the imaginable and the possible had been eradicated. For many, and Americans in particular, danger and terror crossed from the realm of fantasy into a historical record. A catastrophe happened in full view of nations of the earth. Neither the common mind nor the common language was prepared for it."
Prof Heaney, delivering the annual lecture of the department of international health and tropical medicine, spoke on the theme "The whole thing: on the good of poetry" and dealt with the part poetry could be said to play in the development of international health.
He argued that the good of poetry is in finding words that allow the inner world of language and feelings to connect with the outer world of facts and happenings, as he put it "words that stay firm when we press upon them, words that won't let us down when we ask them to take the strain of reality".
Previous lectures in the series were delivered by Mr John Hume and former UN Secretary General Dr Boutros Boutros-Ghali.