The man is solid or better, solidified. Notice Heaney’s interest in conditions which, once fluid, are now solid. Of course, where the two terms, of fluidity and solidity, are used close together in a poem, the effect is that both terms apply and so the object described resolves or, at least, contains the two opposites. Tar is therefore understood as having been poured and now has solidified. Similarly the river is, by nature, a permanent object, but because it is always flowing, never the same. “You cannot step in the same river twice”, said Heraclitus. The river that is himself is created by the Grauballe man’s own weeping, or seems to be. ‘Seems’ is another ‘like’ word. Again notice Heaney’s concern for self reflexive imagery. Here, though, the self reflexion is not an assertion of identity. Consider the difference had he written “weeps the black river of himself”. This functions as a self creating image, fully asserted, in which there is no sense that the action is observed or created from outside, by us as onlookers. The action does not promote an interaction between us and it. It is self-perfecting . Add ‘seems’, as Heaney does, and the action of self-creation, if indeed it takes place, is both observed from outside, and evidently produced by the observer, in so far as it is the poet as observer who draws attention to his own creation of the image. It draws our attention to the observer who said it, that is, the poet.
Between these two ‘like’ constructions is a more certain, less subjective statement, the metaphorical “he lies / on a pillow turf”, which acts in the poem to stabilise the movement and variables around it. Stability is, of course, the intended sense here. This is a nice example of a grammatical construction precisely complementing the wider sense that the statement implies. One further point should be made. We know there is a corpse here and can readily infer that it could be described directly in terms of measurement, weight, objectively accounted appearance and so on. The fact that such a description is not given, but may be inferred as a necessary base line, means that the ‘as if’ descriptions effectively produce a double image, an implied reality and a stated imagination understanding. The effect is to create from a single object a new, laminated reality which is of course, still a recreation of the corpse. In the poem, this laminating process will continue as the poem constructs itself. Immediately four such layered views are added, descriptive of various parts of the body, “like bog oak”, “like a basalt egg”, “cold as a swan’s foot”, or “a wet swamp root”. These are natural phenomena, preserved wood; stone but seen as egg like; part of a living creature, but cold rather than warm; a root, sign of life, but again by implication of being cold (‘wet’).
Each description extends our sense of the corpse, by involving it with aspects of a wider life and landscape, but also each is itself a conjunction between the warmth and growth of life and of some sort of fixity, cold, stone, preserved. We see the corpse through a succession of superimposed filters or tracings, each adding something to a total and composite view. Heaney now tightens the process by moving from simile to metaphor, from his imagination, to the poem’s assertion of the corpse’s reality, “are the ridge”, “is a visor”. The oppositional combining phrases continue, “an eel arrested”, “the cured wound”. The corpse is a repository of many possible views but now also of a single reality. Our concentration is pointed to the wound which “opens inwards to a dark / elderberry place”.
The revelation is this – that we have something that no available word could refer to. We cannot name this sight. ‘Who will say “corpse”?’ “who will say “body”?’ Its hair, old as it is, “rusted”, is like the hair of the yet unborn. Next we have a surprising move. After the vivid, layered meditation on the corpse, he says that he first saw the face in a photograph and now sees the whole corpse in memory. Neither is an actual sight then, understood as happening in the here and now of the poem. These are additional fusions in the reality the poem has constructed, though the one that comes closest to summing up the fusion is ‘memory’ – ‘perfected in my memory’. It is not, of course, adequate because the poem which is, in effect, all the account we have, is not in memory, but rather an enactment of memory. Its interrelationships are possible only to states likes memory, dream, imagination, but its enactment can only become actual as the poem we have, different in kind therefore from the elements which construct it, but intimately related to them, because it is our deepest, most subtle access to them. The body so constructed is again a complex of opposites, “hung in the scales / with beauty and atrocity”. These opposites, like “the cured wound” are its substance, its determinants. Heaney expands ‘beauty’ to “the Dying Gaul”, the classical statue, Graeco Roman tribute to the heroism of a Northern people, his fine but collapsed body unable to rise to its feet, and here “too strictly compressed”, by an art deployed on a functional military object, a shield. He expands ‘atrocity’ to his own time, and to all others, where hooded victims are “slashed and dumped”. This is how a poem enters into human agony, certainly by saying how it is, but more by laying bare reading after reading of the event it memorialises until the unavailable word that is sufficient to it, is only just unuttered.
“The Grauballe Man” is one of many poems in Seamus Heaney’s collection titled New Selected Poems that express Heaney’s experience in such a strong and powerful through the use of mainly similes and metaphors. The similes and metaphors describe the person known as ‘The Grauballe Man’ when Heaney looked upon it in a photograph and how it looked to him in his memories. Through these techniques used, we as the reader are able to visualise the corpse and experience what Heaney was experiencing..
