“Suppose that, after having got rid of all sensations, one should go on to exclude from consciousness all sensuous images, and then all abstract thoughts, reasoning processes, volitions, and other particular mental contents; what would there then be left of consciousness? There would be no mental content whatever but rather a complete emptiness, vacuum, void….what emerges is a state of pure consciousness–“pure” in the sense that it is not the consciousness of any empirical content. It has no content except itself. (Stace, as quoted by Haney, 2001, p.39)
This strain of Beckett’s thought, with its preoccupation with states of existence is also evident in Heaney’s works. In the latter’s works though, the focus is on one particular aspect of the human life cycle, namely that of death. The poem Grauballe Man – one of the Bog Poems– has a startling opening: “Who will say ‘corpse’?/ Who will say ‘corpse’/ to his vivid cast?/ Who will say ‘body’/ to his opaque repose?” (Heaney, as quoted in McLean, 2008, p.299) The poems of this genre delve into the bog landscapes of northwest Europe and Ireland and the uncannily preserved human corpses retrieved from their depths. The title of The Grauballe Man is taken from an archaeological find of an Iron Age man discovered in 1952 in the course of peat-cutting at Nebelgard Fen. It was a peat bog in the vicinity of the village of Grauballe in Jutland, Denmark. The mummified body is presently exhibited in the Moesgard Museum of Prehistory near Arhus. (McLean, 2008, p.299)
The Grauballe Man depicts a situation where recognition and disbelief coexist. The mummified ancient man meets the contemporary spectator with both identification and strangeness. The quality of otherness is marked by such features as “his darkened, leather-like appearance, his distorted features, the head partially flattened by the weight of peat over the intervening centuries”, etc. (McLean, 2008, p.299) Heaney artistically exploits these characteristics of the specimen and metamorphoses the vague human form via startling metaphor of its shapes and sizes. These lines from The Grauballe Man capture this essence: “As if he had been poured/ in tar, he lies/ on a pillow of turf/ and seems to weep/ the black river of himself….” (Heaney, as quoted in Purdy, 2002, p.93) Another of the Bog Poems of Heaney is the Strange Fruit. It is believed that many of the bodies retrieved from bog excavations of the last century were those offered up as human sacrifice. What’s astonishing about these bodies is their ability to
“abolish temporal distance, to make the past present. They are not skeletal remains; they have flesh on their bones and that flesh bears the marks of their living and their dying. They have hair and beard stubble and faces with expressions we think we recognize. They have stomachs that still contain the grains and seeds and plants they ate as their last meal. In a word, with their peculiar capacity to compress time, bog bodies are exemplary mnemotopes and speak of a life anchored in an everyday that was then but is also now. To an extraordinary degree, bog bodies allow us to see time.” (Purdy, 2002, p.93)
The genius of Heaney is in bringing this extraordinary equation of time to the verse form. Both the Strange Fruit and the Graubelle Man make a synchrony between memory and bogland as well as a connection to national consciousness. This is a clear marker of the social awareness of the poet, for since the resumption of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland in 1969, poetry was confronted with new and urgent problems. For example,
“the unforgettable photographs of these bog victims blends with photographs of atrocities, past and present in the long rites of Irish political and religious struggles…The poetry of Seamus Heaney articulates an inner world, a private landscape, an intimate voice. Yet his particular situation as a Catholic Nationalist living in Belfast during the worst of the Troubles challenges his lyricism as precious and superfluous. Heaney clearly suffers the tension between his personal dedication to a reflective art and his public responsibility towards political action”. (Purdy, 2002, p.93)