SOURCE: "A Soft Grip on the Sick Place: The Bogland Poetry of Seamus Heaney," in The Dublin Magazine, Vol. 10, No. 3, Autumn-Winter, 1973-1974, pp. 86-90.

[In the following essay, Bidwell draws a connection between Heaney's metaphor of the bog and Irish republicanism.]

In the spring of 1781 Lord Moira, a landlord with vast holdings in County Down, was approached by his rather sheepish estate agent with a story which led to the first documented find of what are now referred to as the bog-people. He presented Lord Moira with a plait of hair which had been found on a human skull—a skull belonging to a woman buried in the bog nearly 1800 years before.

The details of the discovery can be found in Lady Moira's account published in a contemporary London archaeological journal. While cutting turf the previous autumn in a small peat bog on Drumkeragh Mountain, one of Lord Moira's tenants had sliced into the skull of the woman. He had immediately reburied her but not before removing the clothing and ornaments found in the grave. It was only through bribery that Lady Moira was able to get the story in front of her husband and only by offering rewards did she finally recover some of the clothing and gems taken over the winter.

Upon investigation, the skeleton was found lying under a thick bed of peat at the bottom of the bog. A gravel layer provided a base and large stones had been placed at both the head and feet. The woman had been covered with a woolen rug and a veil of light fabric covered her face. She was supposed at the time to be a Danish Viking queen.

The importance of the discovery for archaeologists lies in the preserving quality of her bog grave. Under normal circumstances, any trace of clothing would have long since disintegrated but in this case it was recovered in quite reasonable condition.

The details of this and similar exhumations of the bog-people have now become the unique artistic property of Seamus Heaney the widely-read poet from Belfast.

It was in 1969 that Heaney read The Bog People, a study of these discoveries by the Danish archaeologist P. V. Glob, but an examination of his earlier poetry shows that he was well prepared to assimilate the book's influence. As early as 1967 he was using the turf image as metaphor for the elemental:

…it's like going into a turfstack,
A core of old dark walled up with stone
A yard thick. When you're in it alone
You might have dropped, a reduced creature
To the heart of the globe.

And in "Bogland" written about the same time, he dwells on the preserving quality of the bog:

They've taken the skeleton
Of the Great Irish Elk
Out of the peat, set it up
An astounding create full of air.

Butter sunk under
More than a hundred years
Was recovered salty and white.

In fact so many of his poems deal with "water and ground in their extremity," "alluvial mud, bogwater and tributaries," or "humus and roots," that it can be argued that his art was waiting for a symbol which could somehow contain them all.

His interest can be seen, for instance, in the poem "Bog Queen," published in November, 1972, and based on the County Down find:

I was barbered
and stripped
by a turf-cutter's spade

Who veiled me again
and packed coomb
softly between the stone jambs
at my head and feet.

Till a peer's wife bribed him.
The plait of my hair,
A slimy birth-cord
of bog, had been cut

And I rose from the dark….

In a poem published in his collection, Wintering Out (1971), he shows a similar fascination with the Tollund Man, so called because he was discovered by peatcutters in the Tollund Fen in the Bjaeldskov valley of central Denmark. This man, alive during the early Ice Age, was so well-preserved by the bog that we can see exactly what he looked like right down to the gentle expression on his face.

Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eyelids,
His pointed skin cap.

Scientists have been able to examine the contents of his stomach to find that his last meal was a gruel of cultivated and wild winter grains. They have suggested that this meal and his subsequent death may have been part of a ritual sacrifice to some fertility goddess. It is this point that Heaney emphasizes:

Bridegroom to the goddess,
She tightened her torc on him
And opened her fen,
Those dark juices working
Him to a saint's kept body….

He goes on in the poem to relate this 2000 year-old death to more recent killings in Northern Ireland and finds his attitude to the foreign parishes of Denmark not unlike his feelings about the North:

Out there in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.

More recently he has published the poem "Bone Dreams" where he again returns to the Jutland bog-people, this time to explore the women (witches?) found staked and buried in the bogland:

Now my hands have found that queen
staked in the bog, and I unpin
her darkness: out of the black maw
of the peat, sharpened willow
withdraws gently.

Certainly Heaney has found rich ground in the bogland metaphor and will draw poetic strength from the images he develops here. There is the suggestion, however, that his interest in the bog-people goes beyond more fascination.

During a programme broadcast on Radio 4 (BBC Belfast) Heaney spoke of his feeling about the Republican movement in the North: "The early Iron Age in Northern Europe is a period that offers very satisfactory imaginative parallels to the history of Ireland at the moment." This is particularly true, he said, of the earlier involvement in vegetation religions, blood letting, and ritual sacrifice. "In many ways the fury of Irish Republicanism is associated with a religion like this, with a female goddess who has appeared in various guises. She appears as Cathleen Ni Houlihan in Yeats's plays; she appears as Mother Ireland. I think that the Republican ethos is a feminine religion, in a way. It seems to me that there are satisfactory imaginative parallels between this religion and time and our own time."

So far his collected poetry has made only indirect reference to the Northern troubles and he has berated himself in one place for deserting his native region. But the image of the bog people "rising from the dark" to reassert their ancient existence is not far from a parable of the drama now being enacted in Ulster.

In 1966 he wrote about the situation in the North and the result he foresaw for the poets of Northern Ireland: "This kind of tension might be expected to have either of two effects on the artistic life of the place. It might induce a sense of claustrophobia and a desire to escape or it might concentrate a man's energies on the immediate dramatic complex of tension and intrigue." Of course, a lot has changed since 1966 and Heaney claims, and rightly so, that he is not a political poet. Yet it is clear that he recognizes his essential affiliation with the North. He put the word on himself in that regard in a poem entitled "Whatever You Say, Say Nothing":

Yet for all this art and sedentary trade
I am about as capable as fungus
of breaking my soft grip on the sick place
or its on me.

Perhaps in his use of the bog-people he has found a way of coming to terms with that grip.