Funeral Rites and Punishment are just two examples out of a great group of Heaneys poems which represent the link between past events and customs, and present ideology. Heaneys main device in creating these two poems is his use of langua

The deaths depicted in the first section are natural deaths of elderly relatives as suggested by the heightened description Heaney uses in the third stanza. “Their puffed knuckles/had unwrinkled” suggest age. In this section it is still a rite to perform a funeral which leads Heaney transform death into something of beauty, something familiar and comforting as he was “admiring it all”. Through his use of personification “Dear soapstone masks,/Kissing their igloo brows” Heaney turned these deaths into portraits of love and respect but most of all of the one’s acceptance of the fact that someone familiar had passed away.

The second section of the poem focuses on the present situation in Ireland when it comes to ritual ceremonies. Heaney’s focus turns from family deaths to “neighbourly murders”. In this term he is referring to the sectarian violence that dominated Northern Irish politics. This violence is an expression of the conflict between two religious groups, the Catholic and the Protestant. The idea of the murders taking place within communities is picked up with this line and relates to the poem “Punishment”. In this section Heaney dreams of funeral ceremonies for all the killed people in this never-ending conflict. He portrays the need for ritual and describes it as comforting and peaceful.

So far in the poem Heaney draws on the distant and recent Irish past to comment on the culture of violence. In the third section he introduces a symbolic character from Irish mythology, Gunnar, a Viking hero who sacrificed himself to end a long fight. In Heaney’s interpretation, Gunnar yet rests in peace because the circle of violence ended with his death.

Punishment was inspired by the discovery of a young girl’s dead body. Heaney takes this discovery as an ancient example of brutality and links it with the odern form of brutality which s evident of Irish rebel’s killing of Irish girls who marry British soldiers. This poem putting brutality as its main idea links the past and the present, history and modern time, then and now. In Heaney’s opinion what continue from the old times to modern times are brutality, cruelty and primitivism. First, second and third stanzas depict the way the girl was punished. Heaney uses imagery to create a sympathetic view on the weak and fragile girl and with the use of “I can feel” shows that he is sharing her pain and agony. In the fifth and seventh stanzas Heaney does something similar to Funeral Rites, he beautifies the dead body and with the use of simile gives life to her present state. He likens her “shaved head” to “stuble black corn”, the noose to a “ring”. Doing this Heaney emphasises what should have happened to her, she should have had a ring, been married, instead of being punished by the community on the charge of adultery, which appears in the sixth stanza and explains the reader the reason for her death. Heaney shows his sorrow and pity for the girl who has been brutally killed on account of a so called criminal act. “My poor scapegoat” indicates that she alone is the victim of the crime of adultery since her partner in crimes isn’t punished because he is male. Although Heaney can feel this injustice he shows his helplessness in helping her. His role is the role of a “voyeur” which is evident in the last two stanzas of the poem as he creates the atmosphere of a passive observer and links the past and present. He compares the brutality of an ancient tribal man to the brutality of Irish Revolutionary Army. What Heaney is trying to portray is that the criminals are different but the form of brutality is the same. In both the past and the present innocents are victimised by their own community in Ireland. He emphasises this point by the term “your betraying sisters”, which represent other Irish girl who were brutally killed on account of betraying their country by marrying British soldiers. Heaney himself is Irish but he talks about the internal contradictions in Irish community and explores the dark sports of human history in Irish Culture and how it relates to the present affairs in Ireland.