In August 1969, the Irish poet Seamus Heaney was visiting Madrid when deadly riots broke out on the streets of Belfast. His immediate response was channelled into a poem that became “Summer 1969”, now collected as the fourth in an autobiographical sequence entitled “Singing School”, concluding his landmark volume, North (1975). The poem responds to scenes of violent conflict, first seen and heard on the television news, and then discovered in Goya’s historical and mythic paintings in the Prado Palace. In a graded series of ekphrastic encounters with Goya, the poet enacts his own katabatic journey from actual, sectarian violence in Belfast and Madrid through archetypal, mythic violence and back into his contemporary historic moment.