Shhh! I'm Reading.

New Feature! Poem of the Week will go up each Wednesday and will feature a poem and ruminations thereon.

I am very fond of Seamus Heaney. Especially his loose collection some refer to as the “bog people poems”. My honors seminar was on the human body as effigy in literature and “The Tollund Man” was a required read. It popped up again in a class on contemporary Irish poetry. But it has stayed with me for that particular quality of Heaney’s that John Banville identified as having a “rich and fecund sense”. That’s it exactly. Earthy, spare and unforgiving and full of buried things: memories, secrets and histories that can not be recovered. There is something quite deviant about Heaney’s poetry. It is as though we’re looking up the skirt of history. Going where we ought not at Heaney’s beckoning. The language is physical, immediate and the reader is afforded little breathing room from the poem’s subject. Often, the two seem to meld. Memory is not an impressionistic and gauzy vista but sweaty brow and dirty fingernail. His poems, this one especially, make me feel a little like a grave robber; a rather delicious sensation.

Poem 3: “The Tollund Man”

I

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

In the flat country near by
Where they dug him out,
His last gruel of winter seeds
Caked in his stomach,

Naked except for
The cap, noose and girdle,
I will stand a long time.
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,

Trove of the turfcutters’
Honeycombed workings.
Now his stained face
Reposes at Aarhus.

II

I could risk blasphemy,
Consecrate the cauldron bog
Our holy ground and pray
Him to make germinate

The scattered, ambushed
Flesh of labourers,
Stockinged corpses
Laid out in the farmyards,

Tell-tale skin and teeth
Flecking the sleepers
Of four young brothers, trailed
For miles along the lines.

III

Something of his sad freedom
As he rode the tumbril
Should come to me, driving,
Saying the names
Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard,
Watching the pointing hands
Of country people,
Not knowing their tongue.
Out there in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.

Hearing Heaney read this poem is a particular delight. You can do that over on Nova (here).

“The Tollund Man” is available in New Selected Poems: 1966-1987.