Endurance is intrinsic to the poem of Beowulf, and is vividly and touchingly depicted here as a bedrock of humanity. And I like the notion of poetry rising like an emanation from a fissure in human endurance.

This is … poetry of a high order, in which passages of great lyric intensity … rise like emanations from some fissure in the bedrock of the human capacity to endure.

Source: Beowulf, Seamus Heaney (London: Faber & Faber, 2000 (1999)), p. xx