Poetry, as I mentioned last week, is so filled with distilled meaning that it can be read only at a fraction of the pace of prose. Thus, Seamus Heaney’s Opened Ground, which I bought a month and a half ago, is an ongoing presence in my reading life. The advantage of reading it from start to finish, rather than dipping, is that (a) I can, when I reach the end, be sure that I’ve read all the poems, and (b) it allows me to see Heaney’s work develop over time.
Thus, the collection begins with selections from his first book “Death Of A Naturalist???. These nature poems remain amongst his best known, and are remarkably accomplished for a debut collection. The poems become more knotty and multi-layered as his career goes on, and references to the Toubles begin to leak in, along with childhood memories of sectarianism. As we come closer to the present, Heaney, now a major name in world literature, is taking on big themes and epic tales. I’m currently poised to begin excerpted passages from Sweeney Astray, his treatment of the Irish mediaeval epic Buile Suibhne.
The collection “North??? is where the political and the ancient were first fused in his work. Largely based around the discovery of preserved bodies in the bogs of Jutland, Heaney mixes strands of Viking and Irish culture with latter-day politics and his typically unerring sense of the physical. “Punishment??? is a brilliantly dark example of such fusion:
I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.
It blows her nipples
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.
I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighing stone,
the floating rods and boughs.
Under which at first
she was a barked sapling
that is dug up
oak-bone, brain-firkin:
her shaved head
like a stubble of black corn,
her blindfold a soiled bandage,
her noose a ring
to store
the memories of love.
Little adultress,
before they punished you
you were flaxen-haired,
undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautiful.
My poor scapegoat,
I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur
of your brain’s exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles’ webbing
and all your numbered bones:
I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,
who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.
Standing as if at a graveside, the poet is looking down upon a woman drowned as punishment for adultery. The presence of the preserved body, rather than a mere skeleton makes the fact of her death somehow more immediate. The poet identifies with her, feels the tug of the rope, the weight of the stone, as she goes down into the water in her punishment. The real crime here, we are invited to conclude, was the punishment. But this assumption by the modern reader, like the tenderness of the poet’s address to the girl (“Little adultress, before they punished you, you were flaxen-haired, undernourished, and your tar-black face was beautiful???) is to set us up for a brutal fall. With the words “I almost love you???, the poet’s identification with the girl begins to fall away. Now his the voyeur again, no longer at one with the body before him. He faces the grim fact that had he been at the ancient ritual punishment, he would not – could not? – save the girl, would have “cast…the stones of silence???. The final two stanzas are even more powerful and brutal than at first may appear. At the height of the Troubles, women who “fraternized with the enemy??? by going out with British Soldiers were tarred and left naked in public places. This was another form of punishment for another form of Adultery. The poet realises that for all his compassion for the adultress before him, neither he nor humanity are all that much more civilised. Outwardly he will make the required show of “civilized outrage???, but he is nonetheless aware of a part of him that can understand the male impulse which leaves women chained to railings and dead in the bogs. This admission, coming after so tender an empathy in the first part of the poem, hits like a punch to the gut. It is important to read the poem in the context of Heaney’s other work, which is never aggressive in its attitude either to women or the Troubles. In that context, one can read it as a dramatization, not an endorsement, of age-old animosities towards women, as well as an examination of conscience by a particularly self-aware poet.