“True hope subsists in the face of, indeed in the very teeth of the worst of human suffering,” insists researcher Paul Corcoran, in an Irish Times article explaining US President Joe Biden’s attachment to the poetry of Seamus Heaney.

In contrast to the Greek philosophical understanding, ‘Christian hope resides … in the consolation of a god who suffers with us (in the words of St Bernard of Clairvaux).’

Paul Corcoran, a doctorate researcher in Trinity College Dublin’s Loyola Institute, tells us that Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘The Cure at Troy‘ is the source of President Biden’s belief that ‘hope and history’ can ‘rhyme’ – i.e. that our own suffering hope of a ‘turn for the better’ can be fulfilled in our own time – and not just in relation to the prospect of a durable peace in Ireland.

President Biden, Paul tells us, claims to keep a running total of US casualties of the covid epidemic in his breast pocket.

For those with access, Paul Corcoran’s complete article in the Irish Times can be found here.