In 2009, Ireland commemorated Seamus Heaney’s 70th birthday “with a 12-hour broadcast of archived Heaney recordings” (Seamus Heaney). This unparalleled celebration of a poet points to Heaney’s immense popularity and influence on the people of his country, who read his poetry as a pacifist glimpse of light during dark, violent times. Blake Morrison, the author of the book Seamus Heaney, noted the rarity of “a poet rated highly by critics … yet popular with ‘the common reader’” (qtd. In Seamus Heaney). Seamus Heaney fits this rare class of poets, having achieved one of the most acclaimed careers in modern poetry as a Nobel Laureate and Harvard professor. It would be difficult to pinpoint one reason for Heaney’s success as critics praise his “aural beauty and finely-wrought textures” (Seamus Heaney) as well as his local pastoralist themes stemming from his Irish origin. As an Irish Catholic born in largely Protestant Northern Ireland, Heaney witnessed the sectarian divisions in Ireland firsthand. Later on, when the Troubles plagued Ireland as a prominent ethnoreligious conflict, he recognized his responsibility as a prominent poet to protest against this violence and thus he took the role of “the lyrical Virgilian guide for a bewildered Irish generation.”(Boland). As a result, Henaey had to search for a symbol that encapsulates the complexities of the Irish heritage and its troubled state. Eventually, one dominant feature of the Irish landscape fit his criteria: the bog. In the poems “The Tollund Man,” “Bogland,” and “Bog Queen,” Heaney utilizes bogs to emphasize the intricate identity and troubled state of Ireland.
Seamus Heaney’s bog poems followed the advent of the Troubles in Ireland. The Troubles refer to a 30-year-long cycle of sectarian violence starting in 1968 between largely Protestant Unionists, who supported the continued inclusion of Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom, against Catholic Republicans, who supported a unified Republic of Ireland. Throughout the conflict, 3600 people lost their lives and many more grieved their loved ones. For Heaney, the emergence of the Troubles shifted his poetry focus. Even though he had started as a largely autobiographical poet, after the Death of a Naturalist collection, he moved towards more politically themed poetry (Hickley). Outside of poetry, Heaney became “a determined campaigner for civil rights,” yet he largely did not support a faction and “presented both sides as more or less blameworthy” (Seamus Heaney). Instead, he took a general stance against violence and browsed extensively for a symbol that could contextualize the Irish plight. After reading the book The Bog People by the Danish archaeologist P. Glob, he learned about bodies sacrificed in the bog to the goddess of fertility in Ancient Denmark. The bog provided him with the metaphorical tool to speak on the theme of religious violence and cycles of history through his art, so he published a series of bog poems in his next collections Door into the Dark, Wintering Out, and North. Critics have looked extensively at these poems and have analyzed them within different theoretical frameworks such as Sigmund Freud’s Topography (Hickley), Derridean Deconstruction and Spectres of Marx (Hickely), and Kristevan’s abject femininity (Alexander). Yet, all these interpretations agree that the preserving nature of bogs made it a powerful metaphorical tool for Heaney to connect Ireland’s past and present.
In his poem “The Bogland” from Door into the Dark, Heaney sets off the bog metaphor used extensively in his canon to explore the Irish identity through 28 lines of free-verse poetry. He starts off the poem by juxtaposing Ireland’s landscape with America’s: “We have no Prairies to slice a big sun at evening” (Heaney). The first-person plural pronoun “we” represents the Irish people, so the poet has taken command of the poem and speaks on behalf of his countrymen. The “prairies” referenced in the poem refer to America’s vast and open landscape especially towards the Western frontier explored by earlier generations of Americans. Although at this time, Heaney had not yet moved to America, one could infer that he had plans to do so since he ultimately moved only a few years later. However, the most likely reason why Heaney chose America for his juxtaposition was not necessarily a personal connection but rather the similarity between the settlement and invasion of the prairies by Americans with the colonialist invasion of Ireland (Hickley). Even though both nations started in a similar fashion, their later progress differed as a result of the different landscapes he juxtaposes. He builds upon this juxtaposition throughout his poem by contrasting Ireland’s cramped landscape with America’s vast prairies. The imagery of a closed and cramped place elicits images of Ireland’s bog-dominated landscape as bogs remind the mind of enclosing people and objects in tight spaces. While Americans transformed their country through the adventurous spirit of open land, the Irish bogs close off the Irish horizon to keep its history and identity intact. The bog symbolizing the Irish identity resurfaces later throughout Heaney’s canon to explore local and universal issues. The metaphor “Cyclops’ eye” further enhances the bog imagery. It alludes to Greek mythology to describe the hills and mountains that enclose the island, making the landscape feel limited and prison-like. However, the metaphor also highlights the underlying danger in Ireland by alluding to a notorious monster in the Greek mythological world. Heaney, thus, refers to the landscape’s and more symbolically the bog’s dangerous qualities, as it can trap people or become sacrificial grounds. Heaney further describes the bog-dominated land with the metaphor “black butter,” which emphasizes the slippery and dynamic nature of bogs. Butter evokes the imagery of a melting object with a semi-fluid texture, which sets it as an effective metaphor for a bog and Ireland more generally. The fluid and ever-changing surface of a melting butter represents the ever-changing and intricate identity of the Irish people. The poem’s form as a free-verse poem with inconsistent rhythm makes this effect even more jarring. Just as the poem itself does not follow a rigid structure when metaphorically describing the Irish identity, the Irish identity does not have a rigid, definite structure but instead changes continuously like the surface of a bog. Like a bog’s layered structure, holding ancient history like the “Irish Elk” (Heaney) deeper and more recent human history like the butter closer to the surface, Irish identity is also layered and built upon into a colossus of culture throughout generations of the island’s inhabitants. Heaney finishes his juxtaposition between the Irish and American landscapes by describing how Irish “pioneers” dig “inwards and downwards.” The country’s limited landscape does not allow the Irish to explore the land like Americans, yet the bogs allow them to explore their history and identity by going deeper into the bog. The bog hoards objects that resurface later in history; thus, it “is an eloquent and resonant symbol of the group consciousness” of the Irish (Hickley), both reviving the natural and historically valuable objects such as the Great Elk and the undesirable sectarian religious violence. At the time of the poem, the Troubles had just started through the Battle of the Bogside in Derry, the place Heaney was born in. Thus, although he never explicitly alludes to religious violence in the “Bogland,” he does set up the metaphor to use later in his poetry to touch on the troubled state of his country. Ian Hickey suggests that the idea of the bog as an entity to resurface historical objects and traits, and thus define the conscious and unconscious identity of the Irish people, is an idea based on Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx. Derrida described the cycles of history as the return of persistent elements from the cultural past, similar to a ghost haunting generations upon generations (Hickley). By that definition, Heaney’s bog metaphor functions as a Derridean sepctre, allowing Heaney to utilize it to connect his time’s troubled Ireland with the past. He reutilizes the Derridean spectre tool again in his next collection Wintering Out.
In the “Tollund Man” from the Wintering Out collection, Heaney moves beyond Ireland to connect ancient religious violence throughout Northern Europe to modern-day practices. In 44 lines of free-verse poetry divided into 11 stanzas, he imagines a trip to Denmark where archeologists excavated the Tollund Man, a 2400-year-old, greatly maintained corpse discovered in 1950 in a bog. However, its cause of death rather than its great shape inspired the poem since archeologists found remnants of a noose and thus inferred that he was hanged. Heaney also used the book The Bog People, which pointed to these bog bodies as remnants of religious sacrifice, as inspiration for his poem. After describing the condition of the corpse, he describes how the goddess “tightened her torc on him” (Heaney). The alliterated words “tightened” and “torc” emphasize the violence of the religious sacrifice. A torc is a neck ring found in Bronze Age Europe and Asia and usually would not have a negative connotation just as a goddess usually symbolizes a positive quality in literature; however, the goddess that accepted the Tollund Man as a sacrifice came from the old order of Gods in European mythology. She takes her victims “through explicitly sexual and violent means” (Hickley). In Pantheons and myths around Europe, an archetype among goddesses and other mythological female characters has been Femme Fatale, a violent yet seductive goddess (Alexander). Prominent examples include Artemesia, Medea, and Circe, yet the one discussed in the “Tollund Man” is most likely Nerthus, the Germanic goddess of fertility (Hickely). The ancient Danes most likely sacrificed the Tollund man for better crop yields. Yet, despite these continuous sacrifices, human agriculture had cycles of boom and bust until the advent of modern technology, which generally increased yield. Thus, the Iron Age victim of the sacrifice practically lost his life due to superstitious religious beliefs with no real result delivered. Additionally, the goddess described fits the criteria of abject femininity described by Julia Kristeva (Alexander), as she deviates from the usual maternal characteristics of a fertility goddess. This characterization becomes a motif in Heaney’s female characters in the bog poems as the unusual circumstances of the country translate to unusual characteristics for female characters in literature. Later on, the goddess opens her “fen” with the “dark juices” maintaining him like a Saint’s Body (Heaney). The fen and the dark juices refer to the bog, a prominent feature of the Northern European landscape present in Ireland as well. The imagery described conveys the message in two ways. First, Heaney utilizes sexualized imagery here with darkness opening to accept a male sacrifice like the female sexual organ, and the body preserved like the offspring preserving the genetic material of the parents. This has become a point of criticism to Heaney’s work since even though he points out the bogs as preserving religious superstitions, he himself upholds a somewhat misogynistic archetype to describe the bog (Alexander). Just as he points out the continuous religious violence and oppression as unnecessary and negative throughout his canon, he himself falls on the other side of another resistance movement by upholding aspects of the traditional gender roles. Second, he utilizes a metaphor by likening the Saint’s Body to the Tollund Man. As a result, he connects the ancient European world to practices continuing to the modern day in Catholicism. This connection becomes more significant in the second part of his poem, where he presents the major theme of his work: the continuous cycles of violence throughout humanity’s history.
In the second part of his poem, he explicitly connects the Tollund Man to the Irish Troubles. Initially, Heaney utilizes several words with religious connotations, including “blasphemy,” “consecrate,” “holy,” and “pray.” He appeals to the Tollund man to revive the dead Irishmen of the Troubles, perhaps appealing to the common humanity he shares with the ancient corpse. However, the negatively connotated second stanza of this section of the poem highlights how the Irish sacrifices for the causes involved in the Troubles also failed. The Irish were “dead,” “ambushed,” and “scattered” (Heaney). Just as the sacrifice of the Tollund man failed to bring in more crops, the sacrifices of the Irish, either for the Republican cause of a United Ireland, or the Protestant cause of staying as a part of the UK, failed. The bog that had buried the Tollund Man, and thus, resurfaced religious violence from ancient history, became a vehicle for the unbreakable, historical cycle of violence. Through the bog metaphor, Heaney connected the Iron Age Northern European world with Ireland’s modern-day Troubles. The wider scope presented initially casts the issue as larger than just Ireland, but a universal human problem. Heaney ends this poem by juxtaposing “sad” and “freedom” as well as “unhappy” and “home.” These words have opposite connotations yet apply to both the Tollund Man and modern Ireland since the ancient Danes who sacrificed the man or the modern-day Ulsters and IRA believe in their cause as a cause of “freedom,” whether it be freedom from lack of crop yield or from colonization. They protect their “home” through these violent acts. Yet, this violence also causes grief and loss for many victims and their families. Another important concluding word in Heaney’s “Tollund Man” is “parish.” Parish is a “church territorial unit” in a diocese but also stems from the Greek word “Paroika” meaning stranger and foreign (Hickley). Therefore, the word captures the wider message of the poem through this double meaning: In Ireland’s religious context, the word brings a tone of familiarity to the poem yet through the Greek definition it gains a wider scope similar to how religious violence can be defined in either the context of Ireland or more universally throughout human history.
In the “Bog Queen” from the North Collection, Heaney utilizes the bog to highlight Ireland’s resistance against British Colonialism. Heaney starts off with a first-person pronoun “I” coming from the speaker of the poem, the bog queen. The inspiration behind the poem stems from an event in colonized Ireland in 1780 when the English dug up the first bog body in Ireland. The queen identifies its position as “between turf-face and demesne wall” with “glass-toothed stone” present in the scene. A demesne refers to the land a feudal lord holds near his property and more widely refers to English colonialism in Ireland, while a turf refers to the peat/bog. The “glass-toothed stone” also paints a colonialistic picture of boundaries to keep away the colonist settlers from the native population. It reflects the animosity between the groups as it displays the need for such a sharp, rigid barrier to prevent conflict. Later, the bog queen describes her body as “braille for the creeping influences” (Heaney). Braille elicits the sensation of touch and contact and also paints the “creeping influences” as blind, perhaps to the history and identity of the Irish land. The word “creeping” conveys the negative connotation of unwantedness and invasion, which perfectly fits British colonialism. However, it also evokes sexual language and sensation of touch to describe a woman’s body. The physical imagery continues as the queen describes her head, foot, and skin’s decay as a result of burial in the bog. Additionally, the bog queens confess to the “vital hoard reducing in the crock of the pelvis” (Heaney). The pelvis again refers back to the sexualized descriptions given to the bog queen as it represents the queen’s reproductive function. As the bone structure through which a baby exits, the pelvis is significant for the feminine traits of maternity. The gradual destruction of this function within the bog queen emphasized her transition from a maternal person to an abject feminine character. The transformation itself symbolizes Ireland’s change as a result of colonialism since the motherland of the Irish which continuously nurtured them throughout history now had to turn to violent and unusual ways to fight off its invaders. The abject feminine character of the bog queen thus symbolizes the abjection and unconventionality of the Irish resistance, which at times included guerrilla warfare and innovative ways of civil disobedience. Additionally, the emphasis on physicality alludes to a similar emphasis in the Republican resistance movement against the British in events such as the Long Kesh prison protest, in which prisoners refused to accept their loss of special category status by refusing regular convict clothes (Alexander). Thus, the bog and its contents once again represent the Irish identity and the fight against colonialism. Heaney refers to the Queen’s royalty and former glory throughout the poem with phrases such as “Baltic Amber,” “diadem,” and “Phoenician stitchwork.” Viking traders in the Middle Ages Northern European world often traded goods originating from Phoenicia in the Eastern Mediterranean as well as their own Baltic Sea. In this case, the stitchwork represents embroidered needles used by the Northern Europeans along with the amber in their jewelry. The diadem also refers to a headband with jewelry, which along with the other instances of jewelry contributes to the image of royalty and glory Heaney creates. Since the Queen represents the soul of the bog and thus more widely symbolizes the Irish land, the imagery of royalty proposes a nationalistic image of past glory taken by the British colonizers. Critics have suggested that Heaney only gives a voice to a female in this poem due to her high societal rank as the queen, and thus perpetuates sexist elements in literature (Alexander); yet, Heaney could have just made the discovered bog body a queen to highlight the former Irish identity and success stolen by its Anglo-Scottish settlers.
As a Northern Irish Catholic during the Troubles, Heaney recognized his artistic duty to console his frightened compatriots as well as support the cause of peace. His bog poems proved a turning point on this journey as the bogs perfectly symbolized his wider themes. The “Bogland” set up the idea of a bog representing the greater Irish Identity, its complex, fluid layers, and its contrast with other colonized nations such as the USA. In the “Tollund Man,” Heaney connected the current Irish state represented by the bog to its victims of religious violence. He drew a parallel from an Iron Age man sacrificed to a Danish Goddess to the modern Irish Troubles to emphasize the continuous cycles of history and the negative aspects of human and Irish identity. Subsequently, in the “Bog Queen,” Heaney cast a decaying royal, maternal soul within the bog as the symbol of resistance against British colonialism. The Queen’s transition from a maternal figure representing the Irish motherland to an abject feminine character representing the unconventional resistance of the IRA further enhanced the bog as the symbol of Irish identity. Yet, Heaney’s worldwide popularity does not only stem from his compatriots but the universal themes his audience connects to. Just as the heavenly peaks of the Himalayas capture Nepal’s identity or the scorching deserts of Saudi Arabia define the Bedouin experience, landscape has significant implications and symbolic value for its inhabitants. Any national identity includes plights such as repression and humiliation as well as glory and the heydays of a happy state. Similarly, religion, nationality, and violence have always defined national identities and reappeared continuously in history through cycles. Therefore, Heaney’s bog metaphor not only voiced the Irish cause in the 20th century but also reaches out to all nations’ causes throughout history.
Works Cited
Alexander, Stephanie. Femme Fatale: The Violent Feminine Pastoral of Seamus Heaney’s North, JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44160367.
Examines the intersection of gender and environment in Heaney’s bog poems including the violent maternity role assigned to bogs
Boland, Eavan. SEAMUS HEANEY, 1939-2013, JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43967836.
Examines the poetic history and relevant biographical details of Heaney’s life
Heaney, Seamus. Bog Queen, ronnowpoetry.com/contents/heaney/BogQueen.html.
Heaney, Seamus. “Bogland.” Seamus Heaney: Bogland @ the Internet Poetry Archive, http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/poems/heaney/bogland.php.
Heaney, Seamus. “The Tollund Man.” Seamus Heaney – Ireland – Poetry International, http://www.poetryinternational.com/en/poets-poems/poems/poem/103-23607_THE-TOLLUND-MAN.
Hickley, Ian. “The Haunted Bog and the Poetry of Seamus Heaney – JSTOR.” The Haunted Bog and the Poetry of Seamus Heaney, JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26657340.
Examines the haunting function of the bog used by Heaney to connect Ireland’s current condition to the ancient, wider Northern Europe
Seamus Heaney, Poetry Foundation, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/seamus-heaney.
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