Viking Dublin Heaney example essay topic

Heaney has referred to ancient tribal practices as 'providing imaginative parallels to modern Irish politics'. Examine Punishment and at least two other poems in light of this statement. Throughout both 'North' and 'Wintering Out' Heaney uses his chief poetic value as a 'tribal poet' to explore and reveal his feelings on Irish politics. The changing face of his tribal poetry strongly reflects Heaney's shifting attitude to the solution of the problems in Ulster. Throughout 'Door to the Dark' Heaney searches for the 'Irish myth', a story which would take the Irish people away from the 400 year sacrificial fighting to remember a time when they were not haunted by ghosts of the past. Heaney believed that the Christian emblem of Christ's crucifixion regarded since the beginning of the fighting as the dominant symbol of Christian Ireland would no longer suffice.

Moreover, not only had Christianity failed to bring peace in Ireland but had turned neighbour against neighbour. Thus, Heaney believed that by searching further into the past "into the world older and darker and greener than the world of early Christian Ireland" could the poet hope to find "befitting emblems of adversity" capable of encompassing those violent pre-Christian forces which had for centuries brought suffering to his homelands. Written in 1969 Heaney found 'The Bog People' (written by P.V. Glob) which perfectly embraced the insignia for Ireland he desperately sought. The book referred to those who had been forgone including 'The Tollund Man' as being ritual sacrifices to 'the mother goddess'. Heaney found the poetic metaphor he wanted in order to understand and thus to control his experience of the Ulster crisis in the potent faces of those sacrificed for a higher being.

The image of the martyr of 'The Tollund Man' blended in the poet's mind with "photographs of atrocities, past and present in the long rites of Irish and political struggles" and 'the goddess of the ground' which had claimed his life came to represent the goddess of territory "Mother Ireland". 'The Tollund Man' offers the most radical and complex statement in 'Wintering Out' about the renewal of sectarian violence in Ireland. By comparing modern Ulster to the 'old man killing parishes' of Jutland, Heaney places the current crisis in a timeless, mythological context. In referring to the 'Tollund Man' as 'Him', (the capital H is significant) Heaney is idolizing him and asking him to become the true patron saint of Ireland in doing what neither Saint Patrick nor Christ could do. 'To make germinate' the 'the flesh of labourers's o that their deaths could provide hope and an answer to how to create peace in Ireland.

Heaney's description of 'The Tollund Man' portrays his sacrifice as almost positive, giving hope that he can aid in changing Ireland. He is described in an impersonal state, 'his peat- brown head', the use of monosyllables removes Heaney's emotion. He has been sacrificed and yet elevated to a position of deity 'saint's kept body'. The serenity and wholeness of 'The Tollund Man' is much contrasted to the 'emblems' created in 'North'. Whereas in 'Wintering Out' Heaney used the personification of 'The Tollund Man' to become a saintly figure, in 'North', the figures become grotesquely mutilated. In 'Bog Queen' Heaney refers to 'the carvings / of stomach and socket' coupled with 'Punishment' in which Heaney refers to the 'frail rigging of ribs'.

In Punishment, Heaney uses the word 'little' to evoke images of a young girl being murdered which arouses our sympathy and disgust. The only way Heaney can fully express the horrific scenes he has seen in Ireland is to parallel them to the exhumed bodies of rotted corpses. These haunting faces belong to victims from the Iron Age but they become the 'betraying sisters' of 'Punishment', chained to the railings by their fellow Catholics for fraternizing with British soldiers. In the cycle of Irish history, images from two thousand years ago still match perfectly with the headlines in Ireland today, 'outstarring'. As Heaney writes at the end of 'Strange Fruit' it is an oblique reference to those poems which he had written previously in 'Wintering Out, 'what had begun to feel like reverence'. The images in these poems are powerful partly because they suggest a sense of nightmarish quality.

Heaney creates this surreal effect by confusing the reader's terms of reference. In shifting the narrator's stance between empathy and detachment in the four 'bog poems' at the start of 'North' and by juxtaposing a sequence of jarringly hostile images, human against natural and beauty against grotesque, Heaney confuses the reader. In Punishment 'under which at first / she as a barked sapling / that is dug up / oak-bone, brain-firkin' Heaney transforms the historical figure into a mythical nature goddess by using natural images 'oak' and juxtaposing with 'bone'. The effect achieved by this is to constantly keep changing the role in which the figures take in Heaney's poetry. At one moment victims of sacrifice, secondly emblems of the violence in Ulster. Studying the Bog Poems from North the reader gets the impression that Heaney's reluctance to shape these works to have a positive purpose stems from his own increased sense of physical despair.

The poet seems mesmerized by the power of the images he has created and what this evokes inside him remembering the images in Ireland. The note of reverential awe in 'The Tollund Man' is lost in 'Punishment' and replaced by something far more intimate. Heaney speaks as though he can 'feel the tug / of the halter' around the neck of the 'little adulteress'. In telling her 'he almost loves her' he reveals the dominant impression gained by the reader that they correspond almost as lovers. Paradoxically, this self absorption is what breaks the feelings of detachment, by inverting his feelings of awe to become love he releases feelings of guilt and divided loyalty which form the essence of his poetic consciousness. In the last two lines of 'Punishment' the poet is driven from contemplation to confession when the sight of the 'poor scapegoat' of the Iron Age forces him to confess that he would not have done anything to save her life akin to his behaviour in saving her twentieth century 'betraying sisters'.

Heaney reveals his surrender to the tribal forces and admits he to would become a member of the tribe rather than stand alone. Heaney states if even a poet can abandon his declared loyalty to the 'perspectives of humane reason' and cast 'the stones of silence' while a girl I tortured, there is little hope left for Ireland. Despite Heaney's introspection revealing how inert he feels to the situation in Ireland, Heaney resumes and leaves the collection 'North' on a different tribal note. The poem 'Viking Dublin's ugg ests Heaney is a poet searching for answers again but rather within his own soul, he is looking outward into the world beyond.

Rather than retreating in horror from the 'skull capped ground' of Dublin, he strides towards to finding a solution. Heaney's questioning throughout 'Viking Dublin' provides new 'emblems of adversity' to place against those collected in 'The Bog People'. By introducing the image of the Vikings, the poet brings a sombre vision of the 'Irish myth' he sought. The poem is greatly reminiscent of Yates 'Second Coming' in providing a different solution. For an age of horrific murder he provides an image of a ruthless murderer, one who with 'a butcher's aplomb' could 'spread out your lungs'. Heaney risks blasphemy in Part V instead of recoiling from the 'civilised outrage' the pagan forces have invoked, he embraces it.

'Old Fathers' parodies the language of the Viking litany 'be with us'. The implications of this prayer reveal if ever intensifying violence is to be the face of Ireland then fierce Viking toughness is needed to survive. Reviewing the idea of connection between 'locale' and 'utterance' explored in 'Wintering Out' Heaney reminds his readers that the name of Dublin refers to's pined and plosive' as the 'clinker- built hull' of a Viking longship. As town records show, Dublin is literally and metaphorically built upon Scandinavian foundations. If the Pope is an integral element in Ireland's consciousness then the Vikings should play as fundamental a role. Through 'Viking Dublin' Heaney reveals an underlying message to the members of his 'tribe' in Ireland.

Heaney urges is people to 'come sniff the wind / with the expertise of the Vikings'. In emulating them, Heaney is suggesting a rejection of religion. Since no form of Christian ceremony would satisfy both Protestant and Catholic, the people must abandon their church in order to unite. Heaney ultimately reveals through his tribal imagery that peace and freedom are the reward of those who dare to renounce the killing. Heaney's changing face of poetry is as a result of his desperate search for an 'emblem' to provide his 'tribe' with a solution to the fighting. In providing a metaphor in the form of an 'Irish myth', Heaney not only reveals his emotions on his desire for an end to the fighting but enables him to deal with his emotions of the shocking images he has seen.