When Hope and History Finally Rhyme: Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy and the Afterlife of a Verse

Abstract

Using Joe Biden’s speech at the Democratic National Convention as a starting point, in which Biden quoted the famous verse by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney “make hope and history rhyme”, this paper traces how Heaney’s phrase has travelled across geographical, cultural, and conceptual boundaries. Heaney’s invocation to hope was originally included in the theatrical play The Cure at Troy (1990), which is an adaptation of Sophocles’ Philoctetes. By appropriating the Greek tragedy of Philoctetes, Heaney devised an ingenious way to comment upon the Troubles in Northern Ireland, exhibiting that only a common embracement of hope epitomized by the rhyming of hope and history could put an end to the sectarian division. Since then, Heaney’s phrase has escaped the boundaries of literature to enter the domain of politics, as it is often quoted by political figures worldwide, with Biden being the last politician to recite Heaney’s line. This paper aims to demonstrate how Heaney’s encomium of hope has gradually become a synonym for change and progress in the political arena.