"Vivid cast" and "opaque repose": A Note on the Literary and Historical Consciousness in Seamus Heaney's Bog Poems (original) (raw)

2022, Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research

Abstract

The early poems of the Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney can be perceived as fundamentally concerned with childhood, horrors of violence and the wonders of nature. They lure the reader into a world full of "the smells/of waterweed, fungus and dank moss". His enchantment with the hidden secrets of the earth reaches another dimension in his celebrated bog poems that look into places where 'there is no reflection'. These poems particularly deal with the metaphor of Bogland, a repository of power and mystery. The bog land, for Heaney, becomes a space of spiritual, historical and physical enchantment, an inextricable link between life and death, mobility and immobility, past and present. Bog poems are symbolic representation of death and deathlessness, endless violence and peace, the grotesque and the beautiful, the silences and the screams. In the bog bodies, victims of violent tribal sacrifice, Heaney seems to have found the metaphors of historical and literary consciousness of Ireland in particular and the world in general. This connection with the past lets him explore the present in an oblique, exquisite and forceful way. Sometimes the bog bodies become the means to mythologise the torture and violence they went through, sometimes they are the repositories of beauty and atrocity of the world, sometimes they are mere eulogies of Irish national consciousness, and sometimes they are the evocation of an exquisite ecofeminist ethos. This paper tries to explore a few selected bog poems of Heaney-Bogland, Tollund Man, Bog Queen, The Grauballe Man, Punishment, and Strange Fruit, through the light of the Irish history of death, violence, sacrifice, guilt and justice.

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References (11)

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