Doug Jones victory speech Screengrab/CNN
Victorious Alamaba Senate candidate Doug Jones has a favorite Seamus Heaney quote he used in his stump speeches - it's perfect for his election win, too.
Democrat Doug Jones' win in the Alabama Senate race is a major blow to his opponent Roy Moore and to Donald Trump and the GOP, who largely supported Moore despite the numerous accusations of child sex harassment against him.
Jones, Alabama's first Democratic senator in 25 years, is a former prosecutor famous for prosecuting the last two KKK members responsible for the 1963 Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, in which four little girls were killed.
Throughout Jones' campaign, one of his favorite quotes to share during his stump speeches came from the late Irish Nobel Laureate poet Seamus Heaney's The Cure at Troy, a re-imagining of Sophocles’ Philoctetes. Moore used it just this past Saturday at a rally in Birmingham:
“History says, 'Don't hope on this side of the grave. But then, once in a lifetime, the longed-for tidal wave of justice can rise up, and hope and history rhyme.' We have a chance on December 12th for hope and history to rhyme in Alabama.”
Thanks to Jones' win, for many in Alabama and across America, hope and history are rhyming again, after clashing so much since last November.
Read More: Seamus Heaney poem named as Ireland's favorite
Watch his victory speech here: