Born in Derry April 13,1939, Seamus Heaney was the eldest of nine children to Margaret and Patrick Heaney, at the family farm in Mossbawn, Co. Derry. He said, "In the 1940s, when I was the eldest child of an ever-growing family in rural County Derry, we crowded together in the three rooms of a traditional thatched farmstead and lived a kind of den-life which was more or less emotionally and intellectually proofed against the outside world. It was an intimate, physical, creaturely existence in which the night sounds of the horse in the stable beyond one bedroom wall mingled with the sounds of adult conversation from the kitchen beyond the other." Heaney married Marie Devlin in 1965. In 1995, he received a Nobel Prize for Literature. He is a well-renowed teacher and lecturer and advocate for peace in Northern Ireland. "WHATEVER YOU SAY, SAY NOTHING "Religion's never mentioned here," of course. "You know them by their eyes," and hold your tongue. "One side's as bad as the other," never worse. Christ, it's near time that some small leak was sprung In the great dykes the Dutchman made To dam the dangerous tide that followed Seamus. Yet for all this art and sedentary trade I am incapable. The famous Northern reticence, the tight gag of place And times: yes, yes. Of the "wee six" I sing Where to be saved you only must save face And whatever you say, say nothing.