Title: Where Hope and History rhyme
Headings: Where Hope and History rhyme
Where Hope and History rhyme
Poems do not rectify a wrong, what they do often is to teach us that what we are seeing is wrong
Creating the Context
Reachable Shore
Museum of Conscience

Content: Reading the history of slavery, racism and the battles by the brave to save the wretched of the American earth within the Heaney lines is to find a frame to understand the events from a different era. The Underground Railroad activists believed in and executed miracles, and yet did not seek revenge. Even when history claimed that one cannot hope, some did. History and Hope do not, normally, rhyme, but within specific contexts they possibly could. What Heaney and the Museum point to, like Moitra, is the necessity of creating the context in which they may rhyme, or made to. The rhyming of Hope and History is a miracle that rides in on the tidal wave of justice, demanded by the slaves in 19th century America, by Heaney’s Irish, by the many global south countries when under colonial rule and, now, by those same nations seeking it from their countrymen and governments. Heaney’s lines, then, are not pure fictions but directly reference histories of civil rights movements. To read History is also, sometimes, to read Hope in that
History, and the contexts that created Hope – and in the process making History as well. Reachable Shore
Heaney acknowledges the shore is distant, but one must believe that it is reachable, not unlike the fiery speech in which the debutant parliamentarian sought to reclaim and re-imagine an India of various poets and freedom fighters. To inculcate belief where none exists is, in Heaney’s lines indexed to the ‘museum of conscience’, the work of poetry.