I have more and more respect for that tradition the older I get but I was so to speak educated

I have more and more respect for that tradition the older I get, but I was, so to speak, educated out of it."Heaney and O'Flynn left the Barbican stage to the kind of rapturous applause more usually given to pop stars, after one encore. Their latest performances were filmed for television and will also be released as an album later this year. So how would this highly acclaimed man with his back to the tree of tradition reply if the farmers of Derry asked him what use his kind of poet could be? "That's a good question," Heaney said, chuckling again as he disappeared off to be photographed.`Keeping Time: the poet and the piper' will be shown on BBC2 Northern Ireland on 11 April. The farmers would say, in a bantering way - and they would still say this to me now - `Watch out for that fellow, he'll put you into a poem.'"That is a deep traditional memory Being put into a poem is a way of being pointed out. "There is some of that in Irish, but there is also more of what we might think of as the local poet's role: to make up stories and ballads. There is an element of the initiate about the well-schooled poetry person."Heaney is himself the best example of that.

The exception was the wireless, which brought strange languages and news of the war into the life of a small boy, who strained to hear the real story behind the words being spoken.To his neighbours in rural Derry the young man's passion for poetry placed him in an ancient tradition. "If you take the word poet in English, there is an element of the archaic and the prophetic around it," he explained at the Barbican. I mean that which the group has put into the kitbag of memory."The poet could use the contents of the kitbag for his inspiration and raw material "Story is primal, really Poetry is more actively and consciously sought. There is a learned aspect to poetry, in the widest, simplest sense, that story does not require. The kind of poetry I would include in that is `Sing a song of sixpence, a pocketful of rye', and maybe certain canonical poems like `Tyger, tyger burning bright'. A story mediates between cosmos and consciousness: it makes the individual child, or listener, an inmate of an older, longer, deeper, more linked-up system."By story he meant "fairy tale and the traditional inheritance - the lump of stuff that is carried around. "The century has witnessed the defeat of Nazism by force of arms; but the erosion of the Soviet regimes was caused, among other things, by the sheer persistence, beneath the imposed ideological conformity, of cultural values and psychic resistances of a kind that these stories and images enshrine."In London last week, as Nato bombers flew over Serbia and the peace process in his own country faltered once more, Heaney still felt the need to gain strength as a writer by putting his "psychic back up against the strong tree of tradition".

I linked it in my own mind to the story of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke in the tower at Duino, going out into a storm and hearing his big music, from which he was able to finish the Duino Elegies and then write the Sonnets to Orpheus. Even the great bad poet of the 19th century, William McGonagall, tells the story of his own origins as a poet and says, `It was as if I heard a mighty wind, and out of the wind a voice saying, `Write, write'.'"Folk stories are the bearers of age-old values, Heaney said in his address after accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. "It comes into Christian mythology at Pentecost with the rushing wind that preceded the descent of the tongues of flame. Peering over glasses that had fallen half way down his nose, the white-haired poet in his tweed jacket and knitted tie looked like a favourite uncle after Sunday lunch He spoke like a patient don giving a tutorial. It ends:So whether he calls it spirit musicOr not, I don't care. He took itOut of wind off mid-Atlantic.Still he maintains, from nowhere.It comes off the bow gravely,Rephrases itself into the air."The sound of the mighty wind is a locus classicus of inspiration," said Heaney. His second volume of poems Door Into The Dark, published in 1969, included "The Given Note", which was about the fairy tune of Inishvickillaune.

"When I first heard the story in 1968 I was struck by the fabulous archetypal quality of it," he said. "He hears the tune coming in, and he plays, then others go to see if they can hear it, but they can only hear little bits of things. It seemed to me it was at the heart of one of the big subjects of the species, really: the given-ness of art, the gift of music."Heaney has spent many summers among the mountains west of Dingle, and met his wife Marie Devlin there. "The music itself is beguiling, and impossible to describe."Port na bPca, which began the show, has become a theme tune for the collaboration between Heaney and O'Flynn. For the past 10 years the poet and the piper have formed an occasional on-stage partnership, drawing audiences larger than either could hope for on his own.

O'Flynn's repertoire goes back 300 years, while Heaney has been publishing verse since 1966. They perform, in turn, words and music inspired by the same places and stories, drawing on the rich traditions of Northern Ireland and the Republic.I first came across Port na bPca while researching a book on the surviving Blasket islanders, to be published next Spring. Some of them thought Daly had heard whales singing under canvas boats, or a seal crying in a cave. Whatever the source, Heaney believes the legend has a universal resonance. It was played on the uilleann pipes by one of Ireland's leading traditional musicians, Liam O'Flynn; and this time the tale was told by a Nobel laureate, the poet Seamus Heaney."The story is so attractive because it has the high voltage of tradition in it," said Heaney backstage.