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 minority. He keeps searching this minority world of his and he shows it in his poems. So he discovered the bog as a new world to him, because it can preserve everything that it swallows. It happens that from time to time human bodies come out from the bog in such a good preserved condition that only an instrumental examination can show the age of the found body. It can be a victim of a recent murder or even a victim of a ritual ceremony – from two thousand years ago. This made Heaney discover his countryside not only horizontally, but vertically as well. The mystic depth of the bog is a new dimension – which is a window on the past.
In his poem “Punishment” a young woman is the victim whose body ends in the bog. Her sin was adultery, the reprisal, according to the laws of that time, is death – after humiliation. Her head was close shaved then hanged up her and the corpse was sank in the bog, like in an ancestral ritual human sacrifice. In the beginning of the poem Heany presents as a narrator and shows us the body of the young woman. In this part of the poem Heaney seems to identify himself with the girl – he describes her situation as he would be experienced with the rope around his neck. This experience moves him away from the position of the narrator who just reports from an ‘execution’. In this section, from the beginning to the half of the poem, he uses third person then turns into second person after he refers to her “memories of love” and puts his commentary on the state of the girl’s mind. However in the beginning of the poem he describes the physical part of the torture, her stigmatization and punishment, the hanging of the body and the drowning of the corpse in the bog. At the same time the young writer also is attracted to the victim when he writes about the wind as “It blows her nipples / to amber beads”. This part represents that the bog girl’s sexuality has a powerful effect on him, but it disappears when he notices her fragility. The sexuality and the fragility create contradictory feelings in Heaney towards the victim and in the next few lines he describes the body in the bog right until the middle of the poem when he mentions “the memories of love”.
This is the geometrical centre of the poem and also the place where he turns from third person to second starting with speaking to the “Little adulteress”. With the mentioning of love he recognizes her humanity and he does not want to discredit her love’s quality. Next Heaney writes the probably most surprising line of the poem “I almost love you”. He reveals his sympathy and even his sexual attraction to the upper described body but it slightly moves away when Heaney criticizes those who punished her — including himself. Heaney could feel some kind of shame and wants to make common cause with the girl, with her sin – adultery, by declaring himself - “I am the artful voyeur” –a sexual deviant. Heaney is a voyeur of not only her body but her mind, too. At the end of the poem with the line “betraying sisters” he refers to those present days of Northern Ireland, when the girls dating with British soldiers got the punishment of shaved head and “cauled in tar”. Heaney’s point of view of the whole situation is rather complex. As a catholic from the North he “would connive / in civilized outrage / yet understand the exact / and tribal, intimate revenge.” Some might think that Heaney’s understanding this act means that he can accept it but the painful presence of violence subverts every explanation effort.
Seamus Heany in his poem called Punishment describes a woman, who is being tortured and killed because of adultery she committed. In the poem he feels sorry for the girl but like everybody else he sinned her before. Heany 's point of view shows sympathy towards the act of punishment and either he receives the other end of the punishment by describing the pain.
Readings
Dolmányos Péter: Múltba temetett jelen: Seamus Heaney láp-versei. = 44. 1999. 9-10. 812-819.
http://www.c3.hu/scripta/nagyvilag/99/0910/22dolm.htm
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/punishment/comments.asp
http://www.lorenwebster.net/In_a_Dark_Time/category/poets/seamus-heaney/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywQ6UugAXIE
http://www.steventagle.com/SPRENG160E01Punishment.pdf