A critical essay on Seamus Heany(TM)s Punishment

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A critical essay on Seamus Heany’s Punishment

Written by Nagy Zsolt

        MA English


Punishment

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

It blows her nipples
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.

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

Under which at first
she was a barked sapling
that is dug up
oak-bone, brain-firkin:

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

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

I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur

of your brain's exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles' webbing
and all your numbered bones:

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.

Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney best known as a living Irish poet was born on April 13. 1939. His Catholic family lived and worked on a farm called Mossbawn in County Derry, Northern Ireland. He was the first of the nine children of the family, so was expected to follow his father’s work as a farmer and cattle dealer but he chose a totally different area in life. He was educated at St Columb’s College in Londonderry, where he met literature of Shakespeare, Chaucer and Keats to name but a few and also studied Latin and Gaelic. His family also left the farm they lived on but the years he lived there established a strong devotion for the Irish countryside and the ancestral background.  Therefore the role of identity and the roots occur important elements of his poetry.

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Northern Ireland has a divided world: republic and monarchy, Irish and British, Gaelic language and English language, catholic and protestant, city and countryside. This is Heaney’s homeland where the protestant minority forced the catholic majority in the minority position, from another point of view the people living in cities are the majority against the minority living in the countryside. Most of city-people declare themselves rather British than Irish. Considering al these we can see that Heaney with a catholic origin, with the devotion to his roots, and that his father worked on his own farm – he belongs to the ...

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