Both Uses of
desolate
in
Crediting Poetry by Seamus Heaney
- It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power.†
*
- The birth of the future we desire is surely in the contraction which that terrified Catholic felt on the roadside when another hand gripped his hand, not in the gunfire that followed, so absolute and so desolate, if also so much a part of the music of what happens.†
Definition:
-
(desolate as in: felt desolate) sad or miserable--and often lonely