Katrina Semich, Fall 2009
Seamus Heaney’s poetry depicting the bog is inspired by the people found within bogs in Denmark. Heaney’s Irish background gives him a unique perspective on the violence committed to these people as a form of sacrifice. His bog poems combine the violence of the past and present with an overarching desire to reconcile man and nature.
Heaney finds deeper meaning in the interconnected nature of human history. He grew up in rural Northern Ireland, and was also influenced by living in California, London, Boston, and New York. (O’Driscoll xxi-xxx). In 1973, he visited Copenhagen and met P.V. Glob, the author of The Bog People, and also viewed the Tollund Man and the Grauballe Man in museums. Two years later he published his poem “The Grauballe Man” (O’Driscoll, xxiv). “Heaney’s source for the bog poems is now well-known as P. V. Glob’s The Bog People. The Tollund Man is described…as a sacrifice to Nerthus, an earth goddess, for fertility purposes” (Molino 89). “The Grauballe Man” describes a man caught between life and death in the bog. “…He lies / perfected in my memory / . . . . . . . . . . . / hung in the scales/ with beauty and atrocity” (Heaney, North 35). The use of the word “scales” refers to a balance between realizing the beauty of the Grauballe Man and the atrocity of the violence committed upon him (Molino, 94).
The Grauballe Man was found with an expression of “pain and terror. The puckered forehead, the eyes, the mouth, and the twisted posture all express it. The circumstances that led to his death were probably not the same as in the case of the Tollund Man [who died of hanging]” (Glob, 39). Heaney imaginatively describes this expression by saying that he lies “with the Dying Gaul / too strictly compassed / on his shield, / with the actual weight / of each hooded victim / slashed and dumped” (North, 35). Heaney is imagining the circumstances of violence surrounding the Grauballe Man’s death, and uses the metaphor “shield” to describe the emotional strain of what this man may have witnessed.
Heaney finds inspiration in the Tollund Man in his poem “The Tollund Man.” This man was found so intact that even his skin, brain, stomach, and final meal were still intact. The image of the preserved “Tollund Man” emanates further meaning for Heaney. The poem uses imagery of the Tollund Man’s life long ago, romantically imagined by the author. He feels a connection to the life of the Tollund Man, who was hanged, because of the timelessness of his surrounding, the bog, and because of the sacrificial nature of his death. The man is completely intact and life-like, despite being a bit shrunken (Glob 36). After analyzing the contents of his stomach, one archaeologist said that “it would have been punishment enough for the Tollund man to have been compelled to eat this gruel for the rest of his life” (Glob 35). The Tollund man’s cause of death was being hanged, and as a result there is the possibility that it was the penalty for a crime of some kind. Heaney hopes to find the same meaning as the timeless Tollund Man, “a connection between sacrifice and survival” (Molino 89).
Heaney says that “Out here in Jutland / In the old man-killing parishes / I will feel lost, / Unhappy and at home” (Heaney, Opened Ground 62). He imagines himself living the bleak life of the Tollund Man, preserved throughout time. He connects that man’s timelessness to the timelessness of the lifestyle of conflict of the people of the bogs, particularly Ireland. Heaney attempts to find the mythic power of immortality through the Tollund Man (Molino 89). He relates the sacrifice of the Tollund Man to needless deaths in his home country by creating images that can easily be imagined to be results of Irish violence. He mentions “The scattered, ambushed / Flesh of labourers, / Stockinged corpses / Laid out in the farmyards, / Tell-tale skin and teeth / Flecking the sleepers / Of four young brothers, trailed / For miles along the lines” (Heaney, Opened Ground 62) likely between the Protestant and Catholic towns of Derry.
The poem “Bog Queen” identifies a strong connection between history, nature, time, and human. The violent depiction of the Bog Queen’s death makes history come to life as a result of her nearly perfect preservation in the bog. A “plait of my hair, / A slimy birth-cord / Of bog had been cut” (Heaney, North 32). The image of a woman’s flesh decaying into peat in a bog, then having her hair used as fuel, completes the natural circle of death and regeneration through the earth’s resources.
Heaney reiterates this image in “Strange Fruit,” the head and hair of a girl having been preserved in the bog through time. The use of the title “Strange Fruit” is exactly the same as that of a famous Billie Holiday song protesting lynching, which further connects to a sacrificial method used on the Bog people during the Iron Age. Heaney further connects his cultural backgrounds (American, Irish) in a desire to reconcile conflict over differences.
Longstanding Protestant and Catholic conflict was his main source of influence in Northern Ireland. Another link that may have influenced Heaney’s choice of topic was a call for hangings of IRA members by the members of the British Parliament in Northern Ireland in 1982. An IRA spokesman was quoted saying that bombs and violence are the only things that Britain will listen to (Lakeland Ledger 7A). The use of hanging as an executionary method in Northern Ireland is likely the source of Heaney’s title for “Strange Fruit.”
Heaney refers to Diodorus Siculus, an ancient Greek historian, as having “confessed his gradual ease with the likes of this: / Murdered, forgotten, nameless, terrible / Beheaded girl, outstaring axe / And beatification, outstaring / What had begun to feel like reverence” (Heaney, North 39). The position of an ancient historian cannot be one of concern in the face of years of violence, as his duty is not to judge but to record. The repetitious use of the image of the girl “outstaring” violence and religious endeavors translate into timeless and unwavering indifference to who wins. The violence he imagines her to have witnessed lying there is of no concern to her, as she is dead. Heaney makes a call to end the conflict over religion in Northern Ireland, as no one wins.
His poem “A Constable Calls” introduces a father figure, who receives a visit from a law official. The boy is aware of the fact that his father keeps the information that he is growing turnips from the constable, and the boy in the poem feels guilty. However, because of his loyalty to his father, and “arithmetic and fear” (Heaney, North 66), he does not say anything, and “…assumed / Small guilts and sat / Imagining the black hole in the barracks.” It is significant that the constable “looked at me as he said goodbye” because it introduces a relationship of guilt between the boy and a menacing authority figure. The imagery describing the constable shows that his character intimidates the boy, and the image of his “shadow” reveals him as a foreboding figure. This is significant because it is reminiscent of Heaney’s childhood in Northern Ireland amidst conflict. Heaney expresses a need to reconcile conflict within himself, as well as ongoing violence in Northern Ireland.
In his book Questioning Tradition, Language, and Myth: The Poetry of Seamus Heaney, Michael R. Molino states that “in both Wintering Out and North, Heaney incorporates the voices of mythic characters and the victims of the Iron Age sacrifices in poems that juxtapose—or cohabit—the recent violence in Northern Ireland and its history of violence and hegemony” (Molino 87). Heaney uses a mythical style of writing to connect these past acts to current acts of violence in Northern Ireland, but in doing so he does not judge its morality. This style of poetry is known as the mythical format “dinnseanchas” (Collins 62).
Specifically, Heaney’s poem “The Tollund Man” can be read in such a way that “the speaker is seeking a source of mythic power in the Tollund Man through which he can germinate, mythologize, or immortalize the victims of a ruthless attack by the B Specials [in Northern Ireland] during the 1920s” (Molino 88). Heaney attempts to create a greater meaning from using a mythical style of poetry to describe connections between current and past conflict.
Heaney says in his work Crediting Poetry: the Nobel Lecture that perception of violence in Northern Ireland was “at one with the poetic truth of the situation in recognizing that if life in Northern Ireland was ever really to flourish, change had to take place. But that…perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA was pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based” (Heaney, Crediting Poetry 22). This juxtaposition is reflected in his poetry. Britain sent military forces there to Derry, where Heaney grew up, after it was attacked in 1969. In 1972, thirteen people who protested against government discrimination against Catholics were killed (Collins 56). His “bog victims…reflect both past and present in a hard life…Heaney offers various images of a culture in crisis…His explanation for Ireland’s current dilemma involves an adroit coupling of history and myth” (Collins 61). Influenced by his exposure to and involvement with the violent situation in Northern Ireland, Heaney uses metaphors and myth inspired by tangible instances of violence caught within the bog.
The reality of the violence of the Iron Age is seen through the lifelike humans found in bogs throughout Europe. Collins states that “Just beyond the beveled glass set in the [Ulster] museum case, the flint arrowheads and meticulously flaked spear tips of the Mesolithic period point to a common ancestry for all the current inhabitants of Ulster” (Collins 72). This supports the idea of discovering commonality among difference inherent within Heaney’s poetry, especially in the case of Northern Ireland. The Tollund Man is a common ancestor for people within Northern Ireland, and Heaney’s use of the Tollund Man as a metaphor for violence in Northern Ireland is evident. He is attempting to find commonality among people who live within a conflicted society, and the fact that the Tollund Man was murdered is further evidence of this. Violence is an archaeological pattern Heaney wishes to reveal (Glob 73) in order to overcome it.
Heaney says that he has “always confined myself to words I myself could have hear spoken, words I’d be able to use with familiarity in certain companies” (O’Driscoll 129). His poetry and the words used within it come from his personal experience and life. For example, the title of “A Constable Calls” does not use the typical word “policeman.” He also had exposure to archaeology as a child. “There was always a lot of talk at school about the Bann Drainage Scheme in the 1920s, about the flints and scrapers found in the mud of the banks. There were even flints in a cupboard in the master’s classroom…I started to visit the Ulster Museum as an undergraduate” (O’Driscoll 136) and found an artifact labeled with the name of a place he knew. “It was a plain yet mysterious place, the river just going along deep and steady and quiet and slow” (O’Driscoll 136). Much of the imagery in Heaney’s poems involves suspended motion, the exception being the movement of the Atlantic Ocean (Vendler 46). For example: “Every layer they strip / Seems camped on before. / The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage. / The wet centre is bottomless” (Heaney, Opened Ground 41). Heaney’s poem “Bogland” further explicates the surroundings and atmosphere of the bog’s environment. The horizon seems to blend into the bog, and objects left in the bog are recovered in their entirety hundreds of years later. Heaney is presenting a place where timelessness and history is physically preserved within the bog, but because of the bog’s nature, it is a mysterious keeper of that history. His imagery of stripping the bog relates to destruction of the environment, which in turn can be associated with the ongoing violence in Northern Ireland, where he grew up. Destruction of his land and people is something he is used to and desires changed.
Heaney’s poetry combines events of the past and archeological finds with current events through the mythical idea of timelessness. In discussing Heaney’s interest in medieval poetry, Conor McCarthy makes a point significant to Heaney’s bog poems, which also involve historical events. “This need to rethink the past is based on a realization that our understanding of the past plays a crucial…role in our understanding of the present, and also in our understanding of the future” (McCarthy 171). His poetry brings to life the violence of the past through the depiction of lifelike bog people, and lends contemporary concern and meaning to historical events.
Works Cited
Associated Press. “IRA Hints More Bombing Attacks; Thatcher Rejects Call for Hangings.” Lakeland Ledger July 23, 1982, Vol. 76, No. 274, sec. 7A. Google News Archive. http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=rZEsAAAAIBAJ&sjid=VPsDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6888%2C2171157. December 16, 2009.
Collins, Floyd. The Crisis of Identity. London: Associated University Presses, 2003.
Glob, Peter Vilhelm. The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved. Trans. Rupert Bruce-Mitford. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1970.
Heaney, Seamus. Crediting Poetry: The Nobel Lecture. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1996.
—. North. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.
—. Opened Ground. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998.
McCarthy, Conor. Seamus Heaney and Medieval Poetry. Rochester, New York: D. S. Brewer, 2008.
Molino, Michael R. Questioning Tradition, Language, and Myth: The Poetry of Seamus Heaney. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1994.
O’Driscoll, Dennis. Stepping Stones. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008.
Vendler, Helen. The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995