men and women, are in actual fact involved in acts of terrorism against the very people they claim to represent. This includes those women whom they regularly tar and feather as punishment for being too friendly to British troops, who are seen as an illegal occupying force.

The grim suggestion here is that the fundamental nature of male violence towards women hasn’t really changed all that much in 2,000 years. For all the great strides that women have made, the superior physical strength of men, with its seemingly endless capacity for violent expression, can always be used to keep women firmly under control.

An Irish poet, Seamus Heaney writes of the atrocities committed by the Irish Nationalists, atrocities akin to those of the French during the German occupation as well as the brutality of humanity in general. His theme is that of "the scapegoat"; that is, he explores how humans engage in killing and other brutalities, but justify their inhumane actions by punishing others who can be perceived as traitors to their "justifiable" causes. 

In his poem "Punishment," Heaney describes the Nationalists' retribution exacted from an Irish girl--the killing and burial of a waif of a girl who consorts with a British man. Seeing her in a bog, Heaney describes the dead adultress, who once had a fragile beauty,

her shaved head
like a stubble of black corn,
her blindfold a soiled bandage,
her noose a ring
to store
the memories of love.
Little adultress,
before they punished you

Further, Heanus even castigates himself for allowing the girl to be victimized while the British man is not similarly punished. For, he understands that this type of brutality is universally human, dating back to when men were but tribal savages. Like so many others, the poet stands by weakly and merely watches,

I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,
who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.

In his poem, Heaney wrestles with the question of what responsibility the poet shares for the despair that ensnares so many people in his Ireland, and, so, he shares in this poor woman's punishment. The woman, too, can be interpreted as symbolic of Ireland itself that is exploited by both the British and its own countrymen as they fight for their causes.

The tone of this poem is one of sombre sadness and grief at the suffering that was enacted upon this bog girl that was discovered, but also how that suffering is continued in today's age through the political violence that is perpetrated in Ireland. Note for example, how the speaker imagines the girl before she was ritually drowned:

Little adultress,
before they punished you
You were flaxen-haired,
undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautiful...

The tone of such stanzas captures the speaker's feelings of regret and sadness at the suffering this "beautiful" girl suffered before being killed for a crime and facing a punishment that, in his opinion, was out of proportion to the actual sin that was committed. This sadness is something that is continued throughout the poem, as Heaney makes the link to modern day Ireland and the punishments of women who were covered in tar and chained to railings. Although he would "connive / in civilised outrage," Heaney recognises that he understands "the exact / and tribal, intimate revenge." Even though he recognises such crimes are wrong, he also finds deep within him that he understands the need to punish others if they step out of line of the accepted behaviours and norms. The tone of sadness remains, however, suggesting that Heaney is reluctantly complicit. 

"Punishment" is based on an actual event in 1951 when the body of a young woman was found in a bog in Windeby, Germany. The girl lived in the first century A.D. According to the Roman scholar Tacitus, Germanic people punished women accused of adultery by shaving their heads, sometimes torturing them, and sometimes killing them. 

In the poem, the poet imagines the moments before her death, the tug at the collar around her neck and the wind shaking her body. The poet then comes back to the present and imagines witnessing her being dug up. He considers how beautiful she must have been nearly 2,000 years ago. Then the poet says, had he been there, he would have stood by, said and done nothing.

I almost love you
but would have cast, I know, 
the stones of silence. (29-31)

This references the Gospel of John, 7:53-8:11, where Jesus does step in and prevents a woman from being stoned to death after she'd been charged with adultery. Aside from those like Jesus, this indicates that at any time in history, people are most likely to comply with current practices (including punishments). The poet supports this by including a reference to how this young woman's "sisters" were cauled in tar and wept by the railings. This reference is about young Catholic women in Northern Ireland who were tarred in feathered as late as the 1970s for having relationships with British soldiers. These sisters would be outraged at the young girl's punishment but would sadly understand that each era has its values, fanatics, and common but cruel practices. 

The poem deals with harsh persecution of women, so this poem does have a feminist criticism of men's historical abuse of women. But the poem is also both an indictment and an acknowledgment of those who stand by while others suffer. It raises questions such as, "had you been alive in the 1850s in America, would you have been at the forefront of the abolition movement?" In any time in history, had you been alive, would you simply abide by the practices of the day, no matter how cruel they might be? 

Heaney uses a lot of enjambment in this poem, which just means a line that continues onto the next line. It is a broken, stilted style in which the reader might pause as the line continues to the next. The brokenness could apply to the broken body of the girl. The pauses cause the reader to stop, consider the images, and consider what he/she might have done at such periods in history, had he/she been there to witness this punishment. 

In his poem "Punishment," Seamus Heaney" writes of the crimes of the Irish Republican Army against British sympathizers in Ulster. He points to the "intimate revenge" and cruelty of the IRA to their own people and compares it to the savage and "tribal" outrages of primitive man.

When the body of a girl, hanged for being an adulteress with a British man, is found in a bog, it is likened to the prehistoric discovery of bodies preserved in a bog after their apparent beatings.

Visual Imagery

• The poet describes the wind changing the adulteress's "nipples/to amber beads."
• He is able to imagine her as she must have looked before her murder:  with visual imagery, Heaney describes her as having had "flaxen-hair[ed]"; "a beautiful face that is now "tar-black"; with her "shaved head," her brain is exposed "and darkened combs" with "muscles' webbing" are seen. Her "numbered bones" can also be viewed on her "undernourished" body. 
• With the metaphor of the poet as a voyeur, Heaney writes that he envisions her "drowned body in the bog" and he sees the "weighing stone," "the floating rods and boughs" under which her body lies.
• The final visual image is that of the other adulteresses who are "cauled in tar" and stand by the railings weeping.

Tactile Imagery
There is tactile imagery, or the representation of the sense of cold, hot, wetness, wind, hardness, or softness.

• In the first stanza the poet remarks that he can feel "the wind" and "It blows...it shakes the frail rigging..."

KinestheticImagery
This imagery represents the sense of movement or tension in the muscles or joints.

• The first line of the poem has kinesthetic imagery as Heaney writes, "I can feel the tug" of the rope on the adultress's neck.
• The adulteress's brain is exposed with "your muscles' webbing"

Auditory Imagery

• It is the lack of sound that must be imagined as Heaney writes of the "stones of silence" and how he has "stood dumb."

In "Punishment," Heaney is describing a "bog woman," a woman who was punished and killed, later to be thrown in a bog. This was a common practice of ancient tribes; bogs were also used for ritual sacrifice. The chemical make-up of the bog preserves the body down to minute details. For example, eyelashes are often preserved, hair color, muscle tone, etc.

In this poem, a young girl has been punished for adultery; Heany makes this victim—called the Winderby Girl—relevant to his era, seeing similarities with Irish women punished for having relationships with British soldiers.

I can feel the tug

of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind

on her naked front.

This beginning introduces the poet's empathy with the girl: his feeling of the tug of the noose on the neck of the naked bog girl. In the second stanza, the wind blows against the nipples of her breasts that are like "amber beads," and "shake" her thin ribs. The speaker, in the next stanza, can see her body, drowned in the bog, with a "weighing stone" attached to hold her body beneath the water.

The next stanza seesm to infer that her body was found beneath a young tree (sapling) that had been dug up. "Oak-bone" may refer to the condition of her hardened, petrified bones, and "brain-firkin" may simply describe her skull as nothing more now than a container that holds her brain. The speaker goes on to note that her head is shaved, looking like darkened kernels on "black corn." She was blindfolded with a dirty piece of cloth, and the noose around her neck did more than hold her fast. (For if she drowned, the noose may simply have been a means to limit her movements, keeping her from escaping.) This "ring" (a pun) is not the romantic kind, but the speaker notes that in the end it may hold her "memories of love."

It is noted here that her sin was adultery. Here the past is being joined with the present (something Heavy often does, making note of the cycle of life—cruelly unchanged thousands of years after the bog girl died), creating the image of a modern woman who was punished because she "franternized" with a British soldier during the heightened conflict of the civil war in Ireland, between England and Ireland. She, too, can be seen as an adultress of sorts. At the end of the sixth stanza, the speaker begins to describe her "flaxen-haired" beauty. She was thin from malnutrition, and then they tarred her face. (Note: for tar to be maleable, it has to be hot.) She was, as the narrator puts it, a scapegoat (in stanza seven). Picked out of others with the same sin to be punished. In stanza eight, the speaker notes that he almost loves her—is this "artful voyeur," as is suggested by one source, her lover who stands hidden in the shadows? He admits that he would be guilty of casting "the stones of silence," remaining quiet when someone—more than one—should have spoken up to stop the punishment.

In the next stanza, the speaker moves back to the image of the bog girl. He studies what is left of her: brains, muscles and bones exposed. Back again to the present day, he stands mute while others like this woman, "cauled in tar," cried. He, like others in the past, did nothing. They should have experienced "outrage," but he also understands (though he may not agree with it) what motivated the tribal mentality to punish, as well as that of modern civilization: a kind of "intimate revenge."

In  his own words, Heaney describes his poem, "Punishment":

It’s a poem about standing by as the IRA tar and feather these young women in Ulster. But it’s also about standing by as the British torture people in barracks and interrogation centers in Belfast. It’s about standing between those two forms of affront.

Certainly, there is much figurative language in "Punishment":

Allusion

A metaphoric poem, "Punishment" creates an allusion to the discovery of bodies from ages ago that were well preserved, much as the body of the Irish girl killed by the Ulsters for being an adultress with the British. This allusion serves to create a comparison of the primitive brutality with the contemporary Irish murder of the girl accused of consorting with the enemy in sectarian violence. 

Metaphor

There are several metaphors, or unstated comparisons.

• In the first stanza, the girl's blouse has been ripped off her and her "nipples" are likened to "amber beads." 
• Her ribs are compared to a ship's rigging: "the frail rigging/of her ribs."
• The girl's drowned body is likenend to "a barked sapling / that is dug up / oak-bone, brain-firkin"
• The poet addresses her as "My poor scapegoat"
• He compares himself to an "artful voyeur"
• The other adultresses are her "betraying sisters"
• The "exact / and tribal, intimate revenge" is a metaphor for the primitive brutality that the girls experience in death.
• "stones of silence" compares not voicing outrage as being complicity with the killing of the girl. This phrase also contains alliteration of /s/.

Imagery

• "I can feel the tug/of the halter," "the wind (tactile imagery)/
• on her naked front (visual imagery); 
• "It blows her nipples"; "shakes the frail rigging" (tactile imagery) / to amber beads (visual imagery);
• "...her drowned / body in the bog / the weighing stone...(visual imagery)
• "her shaved head...her blindfold...her noose" (visual imagery)
• "flaxen-haired," "undernourished," "tar-black face" (visual imagery) hair that is "black corn" (visual imagery)
• "cauled in tar," "muscled webbing" (visual imagery )

Simile

There is only one simile, or stated comparison using "like": In the fourth stanza, Heaney writes, "her shaved head / like a stubble of black corn"

Alliteration

The repetition of initial consonant sounds, alliteration appears in the second stanza with "body in the bog" and the repeated /b/. In the third stanza there is alliteration with the /b/ again: "oak-bone, brain-firkin." Again, with the metaphor "stones of silence" there is alliteration with /s/.

Let us just remember the overall context of this poem. It begins by describing the way in which a woman was punished by death for committing adultery in her time period. The corpse of this woman was found in 1951 in a peat bog, having been preserved for centuries and therefore open to analysis and investigation. The stanza you have identified relates the formation of the peat with the preservation of the corpse. Peat is of course formed by dead trees that, over a long period of time, becomes transformed in to peat. Thus the stanza points out the way that her existence became intermingled with those of the trees that formed the peat that preserved her. This is why the stanza says she was at first "a barked sapling." The last line points towards the curious fusion of human matter with trees, reinforcing the way that peat has preserved the corpse over all fo these years.

The diction used in this powerful poem which links the bog people discovered in Ireland to modern day political tragedies is carefully selected to reinforce the horror of what the young girl found in the bog must have suffered in her last remaining moments of life. Consider, for example, how the opening stanza begins with a very graphic description of empathy between the speaker and the girl whilst she was alive:

I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.

Words such as "neck" and "naked" reinforce the horror of what the girl must have suffered as she was pulled by a rope that was tied around her neck and was also forced to walk naked. Later on in the poem, further diction that underlines the tragedy of this event refers to the "weighing stone" that was used to make her sink into the bog and the harsh reference to her "drowned / body" which enjambement used to highlight the word "drowned" and make it stand out. The diction is used to engage the reader's sympathies for this young girl who was killed so long ago, which then is used to question the speaker's own inability to speak out against similar acts of outrage in the present, as he watches similar girls punished because of the political conflict in his native Ireland. 

The best answer to this question is that Heaney uses middle diction in this poem, as he does in the majority of his poems. The word choice employed in this poem is definitely not formal, as the words are, on the whole, common and everyday words, easily understood. However, the words are definitely not informal: there are no colloquialisms or slang employed. Note for example the following quote from the poem:

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

These words are easily understood, and there is no attempt to use elevated vocabulary that would be seen in poems featuring poetic diction. Correct language is maintained, and as a result, the diction in this poem is middle diction. Note, however, that even though middle diction is used, this in no way undermines the impact of the poem, and in many ways only enhances it. The relative simplicity of the diction used helps to make Heaney's message about punishment in general, whether it is in its ancient form or the more modern day form he goes on to talk about, loud and clear. The simplicity of the language elucidates the theme of the poem, which is Heaney's own reluctant understanding of the need to punish and the tribal revenge that occurs all over the world, not just in his native Ireland.