Seamus Heaney Explore the Relationship Between Landscape and Identity
One of the most striking features of Seamus Heaney's poetry, particularly in the first half of his collection North, is the vitality with which his poetic depictions of the physical land are infused. The landscape becomes identified with Irish national consciousness and collective memory, which seamlessly binds inhabitants and home soil together and shapes the way in which Heaney grapples with political issues. The focus of this essay will be on Heaney's powerful and potentially problematic gendering of this land as female. Ireland becomes personified as a kind of tortured mother goddess, with Heaney's male poetic voice taking on the role of excavator, the artful voyeur. Heaney's representation of the landscape's femininity, of Ireland as monster-mother, gives rise to a series of birthing conceits which come to symbolise the emergence of nationalist resistance action and violence for which Heaney feels a conflicting attraction and repulsion. This essay will interrogate the role of gendering in this feminisation of Ireland's soil in the creation of the political discourse which underlies many of the poems, with special attention being paid to the bog poems where land and identity are most viscerally fused.
Act of Union was written in response to the parliamentary Act of Union in 1800 which created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the act which culminated in the present-day Troubles. The poem manipulates the traditional sonnet form by painting a picture not of love, but of an act of rape as the feminised Ireland is subjected to the advances of an imperially male colonising England, the tall kingdom over your shoulder. Heaney's choice represent Northern Ireland as a raped woman is both problematic and poignant. On the one hand, as Alexander asserts, Heaney is recycling the old trope of malefemale, colonizercolonized and whilst she remains stereotypically weak and passive, the male speaker of the poem is the dominating England who is given not only physical prowess, but the power of voice - thus denying the woman of agency. On the other hand, Heaney clearly intends for the reader to sympathise with the abused and feel justly enraged by the actions of the coloniser who is responsible for the big pain suffered by Northern Ireland as a result of the parasiticaland ignorant child of their union. This child symbolises the conflicts between loyalists and nationalist groups like the IRA wrecking destruction over Ireland and is depicted in martial terms as the battering ram, the boom burst from within. Heaney viscerally represents the painful birth through a language of landscape: a bog-burstA gash breaking open the ferny bed, with the amniotic fluids represented by the slip and flood of the rain in bogland. (The woman's back, a firm line of Eastern coast, is turned defiantly away from her abuser, though her arms and legs are still helplessly thrown beyond (her) gradual hills.) Though the conceit of this poem is utilising the outdated trope of the helpless and passive woman, Heaney is attempting to convey the painful loss of agency and trauma experienced by the people of his land who, by no fault of their own, have been subjected to England's agitating interference.
Clearly deeply moved by P. V. Glob's The Bog People, Heaney based a series of poems in the volume on the remains of ancient humans whose bodies were discovered in the bogs of ancient Jutland and Northern Ireland. In these poems, Heaney fuses land, identity, history and myth together in a way that is both morbidly entrancing and slightly disturbing, not least because of the almost necrophiliac eroticisation of several of the female bodies. For Heaney, the bogs come to represent the memory of the landscape, or as a landscape that remembered everything that happened in and to it . In terms of how these bog bodies tie into the Irish political struggles, he went on to say:
Taken in relation to the tradition of Irish political martyrdom for the cause whose icon is Kathleen Ni Houlihan, this is more than an archaic barbarous rite: it is an archetypal pattern. And 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 struggle.
The poem Punishment in particular, goes beyond implicit allegorising to make a direct connection between bogland's sacrificial victims and Irish victims of sectarian atrocity, specifically that of women who were tarred and feathered by the IRA as punishment for consorting with British soldiers. Punishment is also a poem in which Heaney acknowledges his personal complicity, his patriarchal guilt . He directly addresses the woman, the victim of a hanging, with a sensory empathy, saying I can feel the tug of the halter the wind on her naked front. Just as she is physically exposed, Heaney feels emotionally and morally exposed in the very act of writing the poem, taking on the role of the artful voyeur who takes the woman's pain and turns it into art, identifying himself as the abashed manipulator of others distress. The balanced kennings he uses to describe her, oak-bone, brain-firkin not only tie her identity to the bogland (making it implicitly female), but the symmetry reflects the paralleling of situations past and present. He wrestles with his attraction and sympathy, which verges on erotic (it blows her nipples) and becomes almost love, with the acknowledgement of his masculine impulse to punish the little adulteress. He would, ultimately, have cast the stones of silence and stood dumb in the face of her adversity - why? It is because he can understand the exactand tribal, intimate revenge that manifests in the civilised outrage which Heaney sees as an archetypal pattern of human conflict. He seems to be admitting to feeling some sympathetic understanding towards the atrocious actions of groups such as the IRA: in relating them to the tribal revenge of ancient communities, Ciaran Carson argues that Heaney is essentially justifying these acts, it is as if he is saying, suffering like this is natural; these things have always happened and that is sufficient ground for understanding and absolution. Just as in Act of Union, what Heaney appears to be doing in this poem, and in his feminisation of Ireland generally, is using the analogy of patriarchal dominance over women to covey the implications of the unjust suffering in Ireland (the female victim) as a result of the Troubles, whilst acknowledging his own male complicity in this action.
Significantly, it was Glob's theory that many of the bog bodies were likely ritual sacrifices to the mother Goddess, the Goddess of the ground who needed new bridegrooms each winter to bed with her in her sacred place of the bog, to ensure the renewal and fertility of the territory in the spring that so enamoured Heaney and may partly explain his obsessive feminisation of the bogland. One such sacrificial victim is The Grauballe Man, against whom Heaney, again, draws parallels between the fate of the bog victims and those in Northern Ireland. The opening stanzas of this poem are entirely devoted to a scrupulously intimate description of the man's body in terms of the land. The similes, the grain of his wrists is like bog oak, the ball of his heal like a basalt egg shift into metaphors as the poem progresses, perhaps indicating how, over time, the man has not merely become like nature, but an inextricable part of it, his hips are the ridge his spine an eel arrested. The man's life and trauma are somehow sustained by his fusing with the land and Heaney directly challenges any reader who would deny this state of living: Who will say corpse to his vivid cast? Who will say body to his opaque repose? Like a Derridan spectre, the Grauballe man's enduring preservation in the bog continues to haunt present day society. Most significantly of all is the implication of the land as being the mother Goddess to which he has been sacrificed. His slashed throat marks him as a victim which Heaney potentially relates to the Irish tradition of political martyrdom; perhaps Heaney is suggesting that those who died in the Troubles are in some way unconsciously participating in this tribal rite to the mother goddess, ensuring the fertility and renewal of Ireland's future. Playing again on the painful birth conceit of Act of Union, the Grauballe man is bruised like a forceps baby with hair a mat unlikely as a foetus's. As opposed to the child in Act of Union, the Grauballe man becomes a symbol of new life, of the mother goddesss fertility. He is hung in the scales with beauty and atrocity, physically representing the actual weight of every hooded victim slashed and dumped. This beauty is perhaps Heaney's hope that these atrocities, or sacrifices, represent a kind of rebirth; it is the poet's desperate attempt to give greater meaning to the deaths of these victims, of their being part of something greater which is inherently tied into the vitality of Ireland herself.
Another haunting child of the bogland is Heaney's Bog Queen. In the form of a dramatic monologue, the woman speaker is at last given a voice of defiance. On one level, the poem is a delicately intimate account of her body's decay and reclamation by the land, but on a deeper level, the bog queen comes to symbolise disaffected native resentment, biding its time underground. The poem opens with a sense of expectation: the bog queen lay waiting between turf face and demesne wall, she is placed literally at the interface of man and nature. The bogland takes on more of an active life and presence than we have previously seen, the seeps of winter digested (her) and her body can be read like braille for the creeping influences. This gives the impression of the land, which we can again as being this mother goddess figure, consuming and absorbing the woman's lived experiences through the process of her physical body's decay. This process is what paradoxically results in the sense of a birthing about to take place, of the growing expectation of some resistance about to occur. Though her brain is darkening, her imagination and possible resentment is fermenting underground, her skull is simply hibernating. The bogland is given a new dimension as a live physical space which can harbour, grow and birth sentiments which are inextricably tied into the cycles of human struggle on the surface and, according to Alexander, hers is a dangerous, monstrous maternalism. Masculine interference rears its head again when the queen is barbered and stripped by a turfcutter's spade, and though he veiled (her) again, he is soon bribed and the queen's slimy birth cord of bog is cut. The final stanza's clipped language, hacked bone, skull-ware, carries a sense of anger which is simultaneously a frightening triumph, I rose from the dark. Although she has lost her dignity in her exposure, with the rising of her body Heaney offers hope for the rise of Irish cultural identity and nationalism.
