WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF PUNISHMENT?

WHAT IMAGES COME INTO YOUR MIND WHEN YOU THINK OF PUNISHMENT?

PUNISHMENT

WHAT DO YOU THINK IS OCCURING IN THIS IMAGE

AND WHY?

IN WHAT WAYS COULD IT RELATE TO THE TITLE OF

THIS SLIDE?

DOES THE FACT THAT THE SKELETON IS FEMALE

CHANGE YOU PERSPECTIVE-WHY OR WHY NOT?

HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THE PERSON HOLDING IT? IS

IT POSSIBLE TO HAVE ANY EMPATHY?

HOW DOES STARING AT THE IMAGE MAKE YOU FEEL?

In order to engage the text of Heaney’s poem, we need first to examine its cultural context.

North (1975) was the first of Heaney’s work that directly dealt with the troubles experienced in Ireland through the 1960s and 70s. In particular, he uses parallels with past events to explain the problems of Irish society.

In “Punishment” Heaney establishes a metaphorical connection between two extravagantly violent events: on the one hand, the execution of a young adulteress, whose body has been preserved for two millennia in a North European bog; and, on the other, in an analogous tribal ritual, the savage chastisement in 1972 of certain Belfast Catholic girls who, because they had dated British soldiers, were shorn, tarred-and-feathered, and chained in the city center by the IRA.

Seamus Heaney's "Punishment" draws its imagery in part from P.V. Glob's 1965 study of bog mummies, The Bog People. These mummies have been found mostly in northern Germany and Denmark and more recently in the British Isles. Many of them are 2000 or more years old are remarkably well preserved by the unique chemical properties of bog water. Below are some photographs of the so-called Windeby Girl (named after the location in which she was found), the particular mummy that Heaney refers to in his poem. The first three shots from Glob's book. One shows the girl's body as it was found at the actual excavation site, while the second and third were taken later. The final picture is more recent and shows the Windeby Girl in her current museum setting.

Heaney’s poem, ‘Punishment’ is an exploration of punishment, that links the ancient society evidenced by the ‘bog people’ to his own native Ireland. He uses the history of the Windeby Girl to offer a chilling insight into violence in Northern Ireland; he questions the relationship between Poetry and Politics but is also portrays a very personal response.

Key questions to consider:

What other questions does this poem raise?

What circumstances link the girl found in the bog and the ‘betraying sisters?’

What meaning does Heaney infuse in both these images and what do they represent?

Which do you find more shocking and why?

How does Heaney feel about the ‘scapegoats?’

I can see her drownedbody in the bog,the weighing stone,the floating rods and boughs.

her shaved head like a stubble of black corn,her blindfold a soiled bandageher noose a ring

to storethe memories of love.

am the artful voyeur

of your brain's exposedand darkened combsyour muscles' webbingand all your numbered bones:

you were flaxen-haired,undernourished, and your tar-black face was beautiful.My poor scapegoat,

I almost love you

Heaney’s poem minutely describes the bog girl’s body, revealed in laboratory photographs that appear in a study of Iron Age tribal fertility rites, called The Bog People, written by a Danish archaeologist named P. V. Glob, and published in English translation in 1969. When Heaney discovered the book, it catalyzed his imagination. In his early poetry he had been trying, as he put it, “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 complexity.” Then, he continues, “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 struggles.” [“Feeling into Words,” Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978, pp. 56-57]

In the 1970’s, Heaney--born in 1939 to a pious, Catholic, moderately Nationalist rural family--felt himself uncomfortably caught between physical-force Republicanism, about which he was generally skeptical, and the discriminatory rule of entrenched Protestant political power, one of whose Paisleyite newspapers referred to Heaney as “the well-known papist propagandist.”

At about the same time as the tar-and-feather incident, at which it is possible Heaney might actually have been a bystander, he and his own young family decided to move out of Belfast, south to the less fractious Irish Republic Although Heaney may not necessarily have feared for his life, he wrote “Punishment” from the point of view of an uneasy exile looking back across the boarder dividing his ancestors’ native land.

Close reading of the poem

Annotate the poem with the following in mind:

Heaney devotes the first half of the poem to description alone. Why?What is particularly striking about his imagery? What does Heaney draw our attention to and why?

Consider the effect of enjambment

What is the tone of first half of poem (speaker’s attitude towards subject)? How does he create a sense of pathos?

Consider use of diminutive.

Does the tone of poem change? Which words mark change in tone and why? How does sentence structure draw attention to it?

Understatement/economy of language when describing ‘betraying sisters’

Look closely at point of view ( her, I, you, my I) What is effect of this?

Consider structure. How does poem move between past and present, political and personal?

Use of contrast: tribal/civilized

Impact of final stanza. How do you feel about Heaney’s use of the word understand?

Go back to title-in what way could this poem also be seen as universal?

Read a commentary on the poem at: http://prizedwriting.ucdavis.edu/past/2005-2006/Hoffheins