The number of poems from Seamus Heaney’s collection of poems called ‘North’, which he wrote in the age of prominent turmoil in Ireland essentially in his mid thirties, falls under the umbrella term of “Bog Poems”. The bog, for Heaney, formed an exclusive repository for the Irish past where the swampy land engulfed and preserved the historical evidences of the history of Ireland. ‘Bog Poems’,in the ‘North’, were inspired by the bog bodies made famous by P.V. Glob’s “The Bog People” written in 1965. The peculiarity and interesting aspect of Heaney’s ‘Bog Poems’ lies in the depiction of the bodies that are literally excavated out of it and presented as essential elements of the violent past that have always remained deeply entrenched in the bog lands and have the potential to embody, as Stephanie Alexander rightly points out, “The primary and primal location for all the concepts Heaney was striving towards before North. The bog sequence offers up the essence of the pastoral, the quintessence of all the metaphors for digging into Irish soil, for peering into Irish wells.” There is a visible idea of introspection that Heaney’s tumultuous expression of the recovered bog bodies and his position as the Catholic minority highlights in the poems. My paper would focus on three poems from Heaney’s collection- ‘Come to the Bower’, ‘Punishment’and ‘Strange fruit’- and explore the violent female imagery that have been used in the poems as aspects of exulting relation of the woman’s body to the Irish landscape, preservation and creative and historic regeneration.

 

There are ample references to the natural landscape of the Irish bog land in the poems where Heaney attempts to describe the female bodies that have been excavated from the land. Heaney’s description of the woman’s body in ‘Come to the Bower’ is that of a literal peeling out of thewoman’s body from the bog land. He calls the woman a ‘dark bowered queen” who is gradually takes up her entire self as she is taken out of the land. The woman is in many ways referred to the earthy life of humankind and raised to the pedestal of a goddess. She is literally related to the nature that surrounds and locates her presence in the poem, “Reddish as a fox’s brush/ A mark of a gorget in the flesh/ Of her throat/ And spring water/ Starts to rise around her.”While nature plays an important role in defining her body as the poet brushes her “pot of skull” and “Damp tuck of each curl”, she is also seen to dwell in Venus’s beauty in the lines, “Dream of gold to the bullion/ of her Venus bone”. The process of revealing the body is a slow one. There is no essential shift and the poet goes on in an extremely mellow and sensual idea of revealing the bare body of the woman. An imperative idea in the poem, however, is that of the words ‘queen’ and ‘Venus’ used to refer to the woman. The idea of a queen or a goddessequates the woman to a higher degree of class and beauty and the poignant turn of her life was precisely to land in the bog only to be stripped off her bare essentials and discovered as yet another artifact of history. In the final stanza of the poem, the woman becomes no more than the poets retrospect of the past that saw riverbeds and gold. The bog, therefore, holds a repository of the poet’s imagination of a beautiful Irish past in the beauty of the woman. There is no fierceness in her demeanor and her death that had initially become one with nature, now leaves a footprint of a lavish past that unearths itself with her.

In contrast to a closely creative and personalized account of the natural beauty and the past that Heaney described in the earlier poem; ‘Strange Fruit’ is a collaborative effort of excavating the female body and a public display of the dismal situation. The title of the poem itself associates the woman’s body to a fruit, an element in nature that is a product of a union and the cause of birthing the land. The woman, a strange cadaverous body discovered from the bog, is a by-product of the sanctification of the ritualistic murders that were one of the prevalent horrors in Ireland. The body, in all its brokenness ad peculiarity, is associated with an inedible fruit. Her body, chewed on by the natural forces of the bog, becomes the fruit that stays in the tree and decays itself to an unused mess. The birthplace of the fruit becomes the cause of its rottenness, much like the woman who’s body destroyed itself within the depths of her land. The poem, though highlighting Heaney’s morbid tone, portrays a public display that constantly devours the woman’s body, “They unswaddled the wet fern of her hair/ And made an exhibition of its coil/ Let the air at her leathery beauty/ Pash of tallow, perishable treasure:” The woman’s body becomes a crucial repository for Ireland’s mythic and ritualistic past that made her no less than a “perishable” and rotten treasure of remembrance.  Heaney’s allusion to Diodorus Siculus, a Greek historian who is known for recording monumental history much of which survives from 60 to 30 BC, is an important reference to the idea of preserving history and culture. The woman’s skull resembling a gourd and her broken nose peeping onto darkness are all the hollow parts where the mythic, moral and painful past of the Irish land has exhibited itself. The final four lines of the poem close in on the personal details of the woman who is, “Murdered, forgotten, nameless, terrible”. The poet moves on from the woman’s unknown earthly existence and places her “beheaded” body upon the finality of reverence. The distorted body of the woman stares at him at once beautified and revered in the poet’s eyes. 

“Punishment” is one of Heaney’s poems that showcases the brutalities of a political murder. The poet becomes a part of a journey from the bog land’s past to its present as he describes the body of the woman that is excavated. There is a tone of remorse in the along the course of the poem that does not, however, entirely transform into regret. He begins the poem with the lines, “I can feel the tug/ of the halter at the nape/ of her neck/ the wind on her naked front.” Unlike the two poems discussed previously, the poet embodies a peculiar insistence of becoming a part of the woman’s body and feels the pain that she might have gone through. He harks back to the past when the woman was in the prime of her age, “you were flaxen-haired/ undernourished, and your/ tar-black face was beautiful/ My poor scapegoat,” and to the point that he imagines himself seeing her settled inside the bog, “I can see her drowned/ body in the bog/ the weighing stone/ the floating rods and boughs.” He excavates the body with all its past intact- repeating the unfathomable day of her death for being termed as an adulteress and her death becoming a reminder for anyone who attempts to be so. Heaney remembers the brutal past of Ireland where women who married British soldiers were mercilessly murdered and became a social symbol of national treachery. The poem weaves in through his conflicting emotions about the incident that is political position, as a minority Catholic, could not stop and his emotional self could not bear to endure. He attempts to understand the incident as a “civilized outrage” and offer himself the final assurance of a “punishment” that could not have been avoided, ends the poem in a steady dispute with his inner self. 

 

Heaney’s representation of the bodies of all the three women found is passionately progressing towards the female gender. The bodies lifted from the bog are sexualized and fetishized by the poet to the extent that the bodies become one with the feminized land of Ireland. The assault and ruthless impressions of ropes, thick stubble of hair, a broken nose and a coarse throat become metaphors of the female body that is almost caressed and touched by the essence of the words that the poet uses, relating them to nature. Stephanie Alexander quotes Henry Hart who called “North” a text about "death, sex, and a gruesome fusion of the two," in which Heaney "lingers with erotic fondness on victims of ritual killings, knowing all the while that their deaths were inspired, ironically, by myths of sexual fertility.”

The images of female physicality used in the poems at once highlights the poet as an excavator and explorer of the long lost past. The very act of delving into bog land and producing intricate details of the passive and opaque bodies of women elucidate the male-female binary that Heaney often establishes in his poetry and the politics of Ireland. The position that Heaney takes, in all the three poems, is essentially that of the male ‘usurper’ digging into the realms of ‘feminine’, allegorically birthing bog land of Ireland; consequently, embarking on a journey to the Irish past as well as on a personal journey to his inner self. Heaney is, quite literally, stripping the Irish land of its protective natural elements that have been hiding the bog bodies and penetrating into the mythical, ritualistic and political turmoil that have gradually shaped Ireland. John Haffenden quotes the poet Richard Murphy and his idea of Heaney’s “Bog poem”, “I think the poetry is seriously attempting to purge our land of a terrible blood-guilt, and inwardly acknowledging our enslavement to a sacrificial myth. I think it may go a long way toward freeing us from the myth by portraying it in its true archaic shape and colour, not disguising its brutality.” Heaney’s ‘poetic’ exploitation of the bog land and the essential unearthing that he does not only acknowledges the Irish past but also presents the ruthless attitudes of human beings on his beloved land. Heaney accepts the ambivalence of the Irish culture, making it a part of his creative process.

Heaney epitomizes the bog land as the preserver of the Irish historic past. The bodies that had remained inside the bogs and were slowly intermingling with the Irish land had given the land a preserved political scenario to be presented. Stephanie Alexander rightly points out, “ In North and in the IRA resistance, a feminine religion, a feminine mythos, is both celebrated and feared- and bodies become gendered and female in ways that are both powerful and limiting. The feminine body is exalted and becomes a vehicle for resistance, while at the same time it is never out of the control of men. This is true when Heaney writes himself as the poet/excavator/doctor who ultimately holds sway over the feminine/vaginal bog that is Mother Ireland.” The bog, as far as Ireland was the feminine alternative relentlessly fighting the conquests on itself, was the tranquil womb that preserved its women, their pain, suffering and womanhood. The bog itself was a timeless entity with years and years of political murders, annihilations and ritualistic sacrifices that closed in on it. In fact, the bog resembles the fierce feminine self of Ireland that not only preserves its past but also seeps in the victims of its crimes within her, as saviorswaiting to be discovered. The bog land’s violent motherly passion and the opacity of the female bodies within allowHeaney’s creative process to unfold at the periphery. Heaney is the “voyeur” who seeks the preserved past and the upsurge of creative intent along the lines of discovery and excavation. 

 

The female imagery is used in two extensively different ways in his poems. While female human bodies are passive and inert receptor to the narratives woven around them and become the ‘subalterns’ that are spoken for and revealed by men, the earth becomes a voluptuously devouring entity that pushes inside itself all that happens on land, man woman alike. However, Heaney’s view is not strictly antagonistic or clearly demarcated on the lines of gender. The ‘deathly and devouring’ alternative to the female bodies becomes an interesting idea of Seams Heaney’s ‘Bog Poems’.

 

 

Works Cited

• https://wordandsilence.com/2016/06/03/heaneys-bog-poems/ (Seamus Heaney’s Bog Poems)

• Haffenden, John. “Seamus Heaney and the Feminine Sensibility”,  The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 17, British Poetry since 1945 Special Number (1987), pp. 89-116 , Modern Humanities Research Association 

• Alexander, Stephanie. “Femme Fatale: The Violent Feminine Pastoral of Seamus Heaney's North”, The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 39, No. 2 (2016), pp. 218-235.  Canadian Journal of Irish Studies