Ireland has two Nobel laureate poets, and both have mounted on its stages two plays of Sophocles. W.B. Yeats’s “King Oedipus” premiered at the Abbey Theatre in 1926, his “Oedipus at Colonus” the following year; Seamus Heaney’s “The Cure at Troy,” his version of “Philoctetes,” was presented by Steven Rea’s Field Day Theatre Company in 1990; “The Burial at Thebes,” premiered at the Abbey last April. A New York production should be not long in coming, but a text version has recently been issued by Farrar, Straus & Giroux (88 pages, $18).

The burden of great predecessors is heavy indeed on Mr. Heaney. Since 1985 he has been Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Elocution at Harvard College; Robert Fitzgerald, possibly the greatest classical translator of his time, sat in that chair from 1965 to 1984. Mr. Heaney dedicated “The Cure at Troy” to Fitzgerald, and he must know well the translation of “Antigone” Fitzgerald co-authored with Dudley Fitts. Robert Fagles inherited Fitzgerald’s mantle, and his “Antigone” appeared the year of Fitzgerald’s death. The noble dead cluster around his labors.

And who better for Sophocles’s play of burials and their haunters than Mr. Heaney, poet of bog and of ancestor sunk in it, “bridegroom to the goddess”? Who better for a play of bitter dispute between the claims of the state and of the rebel against it? Half of the funerals in Mr. Heaney’s poems are of relations who died in the Troubles.

Now as news comes in
of each neighborly murder
we pine for ceremony,
customary rhythms
– from “Funeral Rites”

That Mr. Heaney has fashioned a masterpiece will come as no surprise to admirers of his “Beowulf” and his cantos of Dante’s Inferno, not to mention of “The Cure at Troy” and his own poetry. Its mastery lies first and foremost where it should, in searing speakability. He follows to perfection the principle Yeats articulated for his “King Oedipus”: “The one thing I kept in mind was that a word unfitted for living speech … would check emotion and tire attention.”

You know this by the third line. The opening predawn exchange between “Antigone” and her sister is in three stress verses, mostly monosyllabic – apt equivalents for the longer lines needed for the more polysyllabic Greek: “Ismene, quick, come here! / What’s to become of us? / Why are we always the ones?” The short lines, and the balance among them, soon cast an attention-heightening spell:

ISMENE: And bury him, no matter…?
ANTIGONE: Are we sister, sister, brother? Or traitor, coward, coward?
ISMENE: But what about Creon’s order?
ANTIGONE: What are Creon’s rights When it comes to me and mine?”

That last “me and mine” might have, to an American ear, a bit of an Irish lilt to it. This happens rarely in the play, but to my ear, at least, endearingly: “The Argos troops withdrawn / And the pair of us left to cope.” One special instance, repeated three times to make its point, is “beyond the pale,” which to the Irish is no cliche, since it originally denoted the free lands beyond the stake fence that marked the (ever-shifting) area of English jurisdiction. So Creon says of Antigone’s acknowledgement of her civil disobedience, “But flaunting that defiance in my face / Puts her beyond the pale.”

Mr. Heaney cleverly allows the Irish note to predominate in the scene where a self-exculpating guard overlays the bad news he is compelled to bring the stern king with some prose blarney: “One part of me was saying, ‘Only a looney would walk himself into this,’ and another part was saying, ‘You’d be a bigger looney not to get to Creon first.’ It was ‘You take the high road, I’ll take the low road,’ then ‘What’s your hurry?’, then ‘Get a move on.'” Comic relief, which Sophocles intended, is instantaneously achieved.

At the other end of his range are the choruses. Here Yeats abandoned his “living speech” principle and substituted for Sophocles’s mastery of traditional choral meter and diction some of the finest lyrics in English, drawing on all our traditional resources of rhyme and iambics. Mr. Heaney’s move is to trump Yeats with some modernist archaizing. He morphs his blank verse into our Old English tradition of four-stress alliterative verse, thus sounding even hoarier than Yeats.

As translator of “Beowulf,” he knows what he is doing. Pound’s “Seafarer” is his predecessor in Modernist imitation of those Anglo-Saxon sounds – “Bitter breast-cares have I abided.” And when Pound began his Cantos with a version of Odysseus’s descent into the Underworld – Odysseus, too, was a seafarer, and Pound, too, was descending to the shades to give blood to the dead and compel them to speak – he struck the alliterative four-stresses unmistakably:

Bore sheep aboard her, our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward
Bore us out onward with bellying canvas.

“The Burial at Thebes” is never too far from alliteration. But it is when Mr. Heaney arrives at the most dauntingly famous ode in the play, in praise of man and his daring, that he summons it to

govern every line, in at least one alliterative pair on either side of a central break in each verse. Man is unequalled among “the wonders of the world”: “First he has shivering on the shore in skins / Or paddling a dug-out, terrified of drowning.” And so on, gravely, to the culmination: The wind is no more swift or mysterious Than his mind and words; he has mastered thinking, Roofed his house against hail and rain And worked out laws for living together. (Inexplicably, Mr. Heaney leaves out Death, the one exception: “from Death alone he will find no rescue” (Fagles’s literal translation), or, as the plangent Fitts/Fitzgerald translation renders it, “in the late wind of death he cannot stand.”) These choruses are also the perfect place for an island poet to meld Greek shores with Irish – imagery Heaney has long commanded. The gods’ curse on a house

starts like an undulation underwater,
A surge that hauls black sand up off the bottom,
Then turns itself into a tidal current
Lashing the shingle and shaking promontories.

Readers who care about Mr. Heaney’s politics will be unable to refrain from scanning his verses for allusions to the Troubles. They will not be disappointed if this is what they seek. In his own poetry, he reflects often about the language “Of politicians and newspaper men”; he knows the “fake taste” of the cliches in a land of “Polarization” and “long-standing hate.” So it will be deliberately that he allows Antigone early on to sum up Creon’s message as “Whoever isn’t for us / Is against us in this case.”

And as an international poet, belonging to both Dublin and Boston, he will have weighed each phrase for its explosive quotability on the war in Iraq. Readers eager to cast King Creon as President Bush will not be disappointed if this is what they seek. Creon is a ruler thrust suddenly into a crisis of security for his state, and his determination to rise to the crisis is uncompromising: “My nerve’s not going to fail, and there’s no threat / That’s going to stop me acting, ever, / In the interests of all citizens.”

Antigone, in this construction, will then be someone who follows the call of religious beliefs over political orders. She appeals to “Unwritten, original, god-given laws” and obeys “the gods of the dead,” because “What they decree / Is immemorial and binding for us all.” We stare into an abyss when we ponder how many generations have rallied around her words in their defiance of tyranny, then ponder how terrifyingly close they now sound to religious fanaticism and “a culture of death.” But Antigone is no terrorist: She murders no one. She just sprinkles dust over her dead brother’s body and, like Martin Luther King, “willingly accepts the penalty in order to arouse the con science of the community.”

And, in the end, Creon is no monster. One can only wonder how many of the Bush-equals-Creon crowd, looking forward to seeing his hubris being crushed by events, will, if that transpires, then be willing to grant him the status of a tragic hero. Scholars sometimes argue this play would more plausibly be called “Creon.”

Antigone’s noble resoluteness predominates, and her doubts about her course are rare enough to make us wonder how much she actually suffers. The play’s final scene, however, in which Creon realizes his error too late to prevent the suicides of his son and wife, plays almost identically to the last scene of “Oedipus Rex,” in which another resolute king is led off, shattered by the unforeseeable consequences of his action. Mr. Heaney underscores this balance by first having the chorus say to Antigone “You were headstrong and self-willed,” then Tiresias say to Creon “You and your headstrongness.” Even his title finesses the question of which protagonist owns the tragedy.

For the record, Mr. Heaney contributed a statement to “Irish Writers against the War,” published by O’Brien Press. But anyone who wishes to turn to the translator for counseling on the contexts in which he wishes his translations to be read might consider his comments on “The Cure at Troy.” Philoctetes there “is an aspect of every intransigence, Republic as well as Unionist, a manifestation of the swank of victim hood, the righteous refusal. … While there are parallels … the play does not exist in order to exploit them.”

When “The Burial at Thebes” opens in New York there will no lack of reviewers to exploit the parallels. Mr. Heaney himself – like Sophocles and Yeats, each serving the vocation of the tragic poet – will remain serenely enthroned in that empyrean in which the laws of poetry cannot be unmade by the laws of either politics or religion. “That high clear Empyrean,” is Yeats’s phrasing in “King Oedipus.” “Those sacred laws nor age nor sleep can bind.”

Mr. Mullen last wrote for these pages on the Ancient Olympics.