"Punishment" is a poem by Irish poet Seamus Heaney first published in his 1975 collection North. It, along with "Bog Queen", "The Grauballe Man", "Strange Fruit" and "The Tollund Man", is inspired by P.V. Glob's book, The Bog People. [1] "Punishment" highlights similarities between Europe's ancient past and The Troubles in Northern Ireland.
The inspiration for the bog-body poems came after Heaney read the book The Bog People by P.V. Glob, a 1965 archeological study of bodies that were preserved in the bogs of Northern Europe. He published the first such poem, "The Tollund Man", in his 1972 collection Wintering Out. Heaney elaborated on this inspiration in his essay "Feeling Into Words", stating that "the unforgettable photographs of these victims blended in my mind with photographs of atrocities, past and present, in the long rites of Irish political and religious struggles". [2]
The poem is made up of eleven stanzas with four lines each. The first two stanzas consist of Heaney describing how he imagines the woman might have looked just prior to her execution for adultery. He then describes what the body looks like now, after preservation in the bog. The final six stanzas explore the speaker's voyeuristic relationship with the condemned and laments that, although they "would connive/ in civilized outrage", they would "understand the exact/ and tribal, intimate revenge." [3]
Mary P. Brown, a lecturer at the New University of Ulster, found Heaney's conflicted emotions to represent an indictment of art itself, writing that, "Heaney's self accusation in the last four stanzas of the poem is directed at both the man and the poet. The poem has been bought at the expense of action: art stands accused." [4] Stephanie Alexander recognizes a theme of violence and complicity that remains constant across time, writing that, "the bog has become an uncanny reflection of contemporary life, an archive that houses both the past and present, and the narrator seems helpless but to do anything but reenact the violence again". [5] Some critics responded negatively to this association between past and present violence. Ciaran Carson accused Heaney of becoming "the laureate of violence--a mythmaker, an anthropologist of ritual killing, an apologist for 'the situation,' in the last resort, a mystifier". [6]
The lines, "I who have stood dumb/ when your betraying sisters,/ cauled in tar,/ wept by the railings," [7] draw a connection between the past and the conflict in Northern Ireland contemporary to when the poem was written. During the Troubles, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) was known to have used tarring and feathering as a way to punish Irish women who were involved with British soldiers. [8]
The Tollund Man is a naturally mummified corpse of a man who lived during the 5th century BCE, during the period characterised in Scandinavia as the Pre-Roman Iron Age. He was found in 1950, preserved as a bog body, near Silkeborg on the Jutland peninsula in Denmark. The man's physical features were so well preserved that he was mistaken for a recent murder victim. Twelve years before his discovery, another bog body, Elling Woman, was found in the same bog.
Seamus Justin Heaney was an Irish poet, playwright and translator. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. Among his best-known works is Death of a Naturalist (1966), his first major published volume. American poet Robert Lowell described him as "the most important Irish poet since Yeats", and many others, including the academic John Sutherland, have said that he was "the greatest poet of our age". Robert Pinsky has stated that "with his wonderful gift of eye and ear Heaney has the gift of the story-teller." Upon his death in 2013, The Independent described him as "probably the best-known poet in the world".
A bog body is a human cadaver that has been naturally mummified in a peat bog. Such bodies, sometimes known as bog people, are both geographically and chronologically widespread, having been dated to between 8000 BCE and the Second World War. The unifying factor of the bog bodies is that they have been found in peat and are partially preserved; however, the actual levels of preservation vary widely from perfectly preserved to mere skeletons.
The T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry is a prize for poetry awarded by the T. S. Eliot Foundation. For many years it was awarded by the Eliots' Poetry Book Society (UK) to "the best collection of new verse in English first published in the UK or the Republic of Ireland" in any particular year. The Prize was inaugurated in 1993 in celebration of the Poetry Book Society's 40th birthday and in honour of its founding poet, T. S. Eliot. Since its inception, the prize money was donated by Eliot's widow, Valerie Eliot and more recently it has been given by the T. S. Eliot Estate.
Peter Vilhelm Glob, also known as P. V. Glob, was a Danish archaeologist.
Richard Kerr Murphy was an Anglo-Irish poet.
Ciaran Gerard Carson was a Northern Ireland-born poet and novelist.
The Grauballe Man is a bog body that was uncovered in 1952 from a peat bog near the village of Grauballe in Jutland, Denmark. The body is that of a man dating from the late 3rd century BC, during the early Germanic Iron Age. Based on the evidence of his wounds, he was most likely killed by having his throat slit. His corpse was then deposited in the bog, where his body was naturally preserved for over two millennia. His was not the only bog body to be found in the peat bogs of Jutland. Together with other notable examples, Tollund Man and the Elling Woman, Grauballe Man represents an established tradition at the time. It is commonly thought that these killings, including that of Grauballe Man, were examples of human sacrifice, possibly an important rite in Iron Age Germanic paganism.
District and Circle is a poetry collection by Seamus Heaney, who received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. It was published in 2006 and won the 2006 T. S. Eliot Prize, the most prestigious poetry award in the UK. The collection also won the Irish Times "Poetry Now Award".
Wintering Out (1972) is a poetry collection by Seamus Heaney, who received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature.
North (1975) is a collection of poems written by Seamus Heaney, who received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. It was the first of his works that directly dealt with the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and it looks frequently to the past for images and symbols relevant to the violence and political unrest of that time. Heaney has been recorded reading this collection on the Seamus Heaney Collected Poems album.
New Selected Poems 1966–1987 is a poetry collection by Seamus Heaney, who received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. It was published in 1990 by Faber and Faber. It includes selections from each of Heaney's seven first volumes of verse:
Icarus is a student literary magazine based in Trinity College Dublin, publishing work by students, alumni and staff of the university. The magazine is the earliest-founded arts publication still extant in Ireland.
Collected Poems is a spoken-word recording of the Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney reading his own work. It was released by RTÉ to mark his 70th birthday, which occurred on 13 April 2009. The fifteen-CD boxed set spans 556 tracks in over twelve hours of oral performance by the poet. The entire work was also released on one disc in MP3 format.
Human Chain is the twelfth and final poetry collection by Seamus Heaney. It was first published in 2010 by the Faber and Faber.
That part of the United Kingdom called Northern Ireland was created in 1922, with the partition of the island of Ireland. The majority of the population of Northern Ireland wanted to remain within the United Kingdom. Most of these were the Protestant descendants of settlers from Great Britain.
The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved is an archaeological study of the bog bodies of Northern Europe written by the Danish archaeologist P.V. Glob. First published in 1965 by Gyldendal under the Danish title of Mosefolket: Jernalderens Mennesker bevaret i 2000 År, it was translated into English by the English archaeologist Rupert Bruce-Mitford and published by Faber and Faber in 1969. In 1966 it was translated into German by Thyra Dohrenburg and published by Winkler Verlag Munich under the title Die Schläfer im Moor.
Beowulf: A New Verse Translation is a verse translation of the Old English epic poem Beowulf into modern English by the Irish poet and playwright Seamus Heaney. It was published in 1999 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux and Faber and Faber, and won that year's Whitbread Book of the Year Award.
Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–2001 is a 2001 collection of prose by Seamus Heaney, published by Faber and Faber. It features reprints from earlier Heaney collections, and several works previously published in newspapers, as lectures, or contributions to books.
Opened Ground: Poems 1966–1996 is a 1998 poetry collection by Seamus Heaney, published by Faber and Faber. It was published to replace his earlier 1990 collection titled New Selected Poems 1966–1987, including poems from said collection and later poems published after its release.