"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 BC, during the period characterised in Scandinavia as the Pre-Roman Iron Age. He was found in 1950, preserved as a bog body, 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 finding, 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. Heaney was and is still recognised as one of the principal contributors to poetry in Ireland during his lifetime. 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.
Brian Merriman or in Irish Brian Mac Giolla Meidhre was an Irish language bard, farmer, and hedge school teacher from rural County Clare. His single surviving work of substance, the 1000-line long Dream vision poem Cúirt An Mheán Oíche, is often compared to the works of François Rabelais. It is widely regarded as the greatest work of comic verse in the history of Irish poetry.
Richard 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".
The Faber Book of Irish Verse was a poetry anthology edited by John Montague and first published in 1974 by Faber and Faber. Recognised as an important collection, it has been described as 'the only general anthology of Irish verse in the past 30 years that has a claim to be a work of art in itself ... still the freshest introduction to the full range of Irish poetry'. According to Montague, "I'm dealing with a thousand years of Irish verse in under four hundred pages. I needed a thousand pages.'
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.
Station Island is the sixth collection of original poetry written by the Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. It is dedicated to the Northern Irish playwright Brian Friel. The collection was first published in the UK and Ireland in 1984 by Faber & Faber and was then published in America by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1985. Seamus 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. The magazine is the earliest arts publication 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.
Edna Longley is an Irish literary critic and cultural commentator specialising in modern Irish and British poetry.
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 colonists 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 Werlag Munich under the title Die Schläfer im Moor.
The Gallery Press is an independent Irish publishing company, publishing Irish poetry, drama and prose by contemporary Irish writers.
Beowulf: A New Verse Translation is a verse translation of the Old English epic poem Beowulf into the modern English language by Seamus Heaney. Translated throughout the late 1990s, it was published in 1999 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux and won that year's Whitbread Book of the Year Award. It is dedicated in memory of Heaney's friend, the poet and translator Ted Hughes.