Anything Can Happen

Seamus Heaney Anything Can Happen

Heaney translated and adapted a Greek poem, Horace’s Ode 1, 34 and added a final stanza to it in order to reflect on the events of 9/11 in New York. The lines used for the image are;

Anything can happen, the tallest towers

Be overturned, those in high places daunted,

Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune Swoops

In the poem, Jupiter on “his thunder cart and his horses” gets the blame as he “hurls the lightning” and “those in high places (are) daunted” all on “the Atlantic shore itself”. The final stanza tells of telluric ash and Capstones shifting. "Stropped beak fortune" probably refers to the eagle in the American Airlines livery of one of the aeroplanes. The hippogriff in the painting is combination of Jupiter's horse and a stropped beaked eagle.

The poem is from District and Circle. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2006.

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