Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996

Presentation of Three Bog PoemsBog Queen, The Grauballe Man, and Punishment

In Preoccupations, Heaney has expressed his view of poetry as divination, poetry as revelation
of the self to the self, as restoration of the culture to itself; poems are elements of continuity,
with the aura and authenticity of archaeological finds, where the buried shard has an importance
that is not diminished by the importance of the buried city; poetry as a dig, a dig for finds that
end up being plants (41)

He has also noted his fascination with bogland and it led to his later idea of bog as the memory
of the landscape, or as a landscape that remembered everything that happened in and to it (54).

Heaney has committed to a search for images and symbols adequate to our predicament and
the discovery of a field of force in which, without abandoning fidelity to the processes and
experience of poetry as I have outlined them, it would be possible to encompass the perspectives
of a humane reason and at the same time to grant the religious intensity of the violence its
deplorable authenticity and complicity (56-57).

Questions:

1. What does continuity suggest?

2. What is Heaneys view of history?
3. How does Heaney articulate the past and the present?

Discovery and Imagination in Bog Queen

Bog Queen takes the form of a female monologue, making an account of her long-time stay
underground and her discovery later by the turf-cutter. That the poem starts with I lay waiting
and that this line repeats in the fourth stanza implicate a doomed discovery of the bog body and
predict her rise at the end of the poem. The bog body to be discovered emphasizes the value of
its existence in present time not as something in the past but something from the past; or, as
Docherty puts it, to dig is to discover not the past at all but rather the presence of the past
(208) related to the present, which is a living present and the mutability of that present, its
fluidity or flux (211).

Apart from the emphasis of waiting, Bog Queen also highlights the continuous passage of
time. Assuming the posture as a queen, the speaker laments how passage of time has
disintegrated her body and dignity.

My body was braille braille textualizes the body, as words written by influences.
for the creeping influences: creeping implies the slow unperceivable change.
dawn suns groped over my head ? cycle of sunrise and sunset, accompanied with the opposition in
and cooled at my feet, direction indicated by head and feet

through my fabrics and skins

the seeps of winter Various wintry imageries present a harsh destructive force and also
digested me, suggest the cycle of seasons.
the illiterate roots illiterate, recalling braille, makes her almost the
unintelligibility of a script in a lost language (Vendler 46)
pondered and died
in the cavings
of stomach and socket.

My diadem grew carious, grew again suggests influences

gemstones dropped
in the peat floe
like the bearings of history. bearings of history implicates that history is a machine
constantly moving with its bearings and hence opposed to the
isolated, immutable historical view.

However, time and the bog flow could not destroy the bog body.

my brain darkening. The metaphor of the brain as spawn that fermented dreams suggests the
a jar of spawn vitality of mind.
fermenting underground

dreams of Baltic amber.

My skull hibernated hibernated predicates awakening. Therefore, despite disintegrating forces

in the wet nest of my hair. underground, the poem asserts that something of the past is always
preserved, and is always ready to be rediscovered (Vendler 47).
Moreover, it is Heaneys imaginative poetic voice that bridges the past and the present which
enables the continuity of time and embraces the present when the poem is penned down. The
past that is shifting and correspondent to the present destabilizes the objective historical view.
Therefore, the only way to reach for the past is through subjective interpretation or exploration
from the present. In the case of Bog Queen, the poet resorts to imaginative exploration.

Memory and Repetitiveness of History in The Grauballe Man

In The Grauballe Man the speaker sees the repetitiveness of history through his memory of and
reflection upon a bog body as a victim of violence. The poem attempts to look at the bog body
with an objective view, to describe the body in great details, including the grain of his wrist,
the ball of his heel, the instep, the hips, the head, the chin, the slashed throat, and the rusted
hair.

The connection between the past and the present is revealed from Grauballe mans forms of
existence for the speaker. The description of all the details seems to be a result of careful visual
study. Later in the poem, the speaker tells his encounter with the bog body.

I first saw his twisted face

in a photograph, A photograph only registers in the speaker a head and shoulder

a head and shoulder bruised like a forceps baby, which is sketchy and distanced.
out of the peat,
bruised like a forceps baby,

but now he lies

perfected in my memory, Detailed memory of Grauballe man makes him an intimate part of
down to the red horn the speaker, which will continue to exist through the speakers thinking
of his nails, and remembering.

hung in the scales

with beauty and atrocity:
with the Dying Gaul Allusion to the Dying Gaul stresses the highly aesthetic existence of
too strictly compassed the Grauballe man. compassed denotes the inadequacy of aesthetic
value
on his shield,
with the actual weight
of each hooded victim,
slashed and dumped.
actual weight weighs down beauty
slashed, harking back to Grauballe mans slashed throat, indicates
repeated violence. dumped brutally ends both the physical existence
of victims bodies and the aesthetical existence of these victims in this
poem.

the presence of the past is embodied by Grauballe mans integration into the speakers memory,
in which he is not an isolated piece but a pattern followed by continuous repetition.

Empathy in Punishment

In Punishment, the speaker gets rid of the objective description and takes an empathetic
attitude toward the bog girl presumed to be punished for adultery. The speaker juxtaposes the
past and the present by an allusion to the recent event of violence caused by IRA.

I can feel the tug

of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.

I can see her drowned I can feel and I can see identify the speaker with the bog girl.
body in the bog,
the weighing stone,
the floating rods and boughs.

Little adulteress,
before they punished you

you were flaxen-haired, The speaker imagines and regrets for the lost beauty of the little
undernourished, and your adulteress.
tar-black face was beautiful.
My poor scapegoat,
Sentimental wording such as my poor scapegoat and love
I almost love you reveals the intimate attachment to the bog girl.
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur artful voyeur indicates the speakers self-consciousness as a poet
and acknowledges his distanced perspective; inadequacy of aesthetic
of your brains exposed appreciation
and darkened combs,
your muscles webbing
and all your numbered bones:

I who have stood dumb

when your betraying sisters, sisters signifies familial connection without generation gap
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,

who would connive

in civilized outrage Empathy grew into guilt because he holds the contradictory feelings
yet understand the exact of civilized outrage and tribal satisfaction (Stallworthy 168).
and tribal, intimate revenge.
By imagining the sufferance of the bog girl and recalling his stance in front of the recent event,
the speaker unifies the two occurrences. Faced with the bog girl, the speaker refuses to objectify
and revere. Instead, he identifies himself with her. With his empathy, the speaker restores the
mummy-like body to flesh and blood as human as the recent victims of IRA violence.

In the three poems, Heaney shows us the shifting past in correspondence with the present
through his imagination, memory, and empathy toward the bog bodies. His preference of the
presence of past to the past denies an isolated objective view of history; instead, he stresses
the mutable historical view with the continuous passage of time, a view of the past to be
discovered in order to construct an unbroken relationship with the present. Continuity,
therefore, can be interpreted in the light of a flux view of time, which marks changes yet
incorporates unstoppably everything as shown in the comparison of bogland to the landscape of
memory; in terms of artistic endeavor, continuity is the subjective construction and
interpretation of the past exemplified by Heaneys own commitment to digging.

Questions to be explored:

1. artful voyeurism vs. the aesthetic attempt to connect

2. the relationship between the poet and his poetic voice
3. history vs. historical view vs. representation of history
4. memory

Works Cited:

Docherty, Thomas. "Ana-; or Postmodernism, Landscape, Seamus Heaney." Seamus Heaney.

Palgrave Macmillan UK, 1997. 206-222.

Heaney, Seamus. Opened ground: selected poems, 1966-1996. Macmillan, 1999.

---. Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968-1978. Macmillan, 2014.

Stallworthy, Jon. "The Poet as Archaeologist: WB Yeats and Seamus Heaney." The Review of
English Studies 33.130 (1982): 158-174.

Vendler, Helen Hennessy. Archaeologies. Seamus Heaney. Harvard University Press, 2000.39-
57.