US presidential candidate Joe Biden quoted lines from Seamus Heaney’s translation of Sophocles’ Philoctetes, for his Democratic party nomination acceptance speech on Thursday, the Observer reports today.

Biden quoted Heaney saying: “History says, Don’t hope / On this side of the grave. / But then, once in a lifetime / The longed-for tidal wave / Of justice can rise up / And hope and history rhyme.” The former vice president added: “This is our moment to make hope and history rhyme.”

lrish historian and literary critic Robert Fitzroy Foster, author of a study of Heaney, published on 25 August  by Princeton University Press, said that Bill Clinton and Mary Robinson both used the same Heaney quotation at the time of the Good Friday agreement.

“Biden apparently is a reader of poetry, and read Yeats and Heaney to improve his stutter,” Foster said. “He has spoken about his admiration for Irish poetry. So he was coming from a background of literacy. Coming up against a functionally illiterate president, it is quite a contrast.”

Sophocles’ play, first performed in 409BC, is about how a bitter division was overcome between the archer Philoctetes, left on Crete with a festering wound – a snake bite – and Odysseus, who needed his help in the Trojan war. Heaney’s free 1991 translation speaks directly to Northern Ireland and its conflicts.

The Observer adds that poet and critic Edward Hirsch said: “Heaney altered the weight of the play to place great emphasis on Neoptolemus, the go-between figure, an honourable, decent man, so the play is in many ways about negotiation.”

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