TOP96-DES93
This Old Poem #96:
Seamus Heaney’s The Tollund Man
Copyright © by Dan Schneider, 7/2/04

  Seamus Heaney is 1 of those poets that every 1 thinks is good merely because he was given a Nobel Prize. The truth is that SH is merely ok. He’s not really a doggerelist but sort of occupies the Stephen Spender role in contemporary poetry- that of a very famous poet that no 1- not even most poets- can recall a single memorable line that he’s written. It’s not that his poetry is cliché-ridden, although it certainly has its share, simply that it’s dull. There are no great images, no music of the ear nor mind that makes 1 declare- ‘Ah, Heaney!’.
  Here’s an example of what I mean:

Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hadges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like snails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.

  This is the last stanza from his poem Death of a Naturalist. Aside from some banal metaphors & similes why should this be considered poetry? We simply get a lot of description of the natural. I like good nature poetry- but this ain’t it. SH has been dubbed the successor to W.B. Yeats simply because he’s Irish & won the Nobel Prize. But even when Yeats was dull he was musicked. Where is the rhythm in this?

    Then one hot day when fields were rank with cowdung in the grass the angry frogs invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges to a coarse croaking that I had not heard before. The air was thick with a bass chorus. Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked on sods; their loose necks pulsed like snails. Some hopped: the slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting. I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings were gathered there for vengeance and I knew that if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.

    Rendered as the prose it is actually improves the ‘poem’ because we are not forced to pause at line breaks. I won’t even go into the unnecessary habit of capitalizing words at a line’s start- even if it’s in the middle of a grammatical sentence.
  Let me give you the last stanza of another poem, this 1 called Blackberry-picking:

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

  At least SH attempts some off-rhymes & alliteration/assonance. But, again. Look at the prosaic rhythm. If what were being described were well-described, or in heightened language the lack of real music might be an interesting tension in a reader’s mind. Instead, it’s more slightly decorated prose than the 1st poem’s selection. No deep abiding metaphor, no music, no ‘dash’. The Lake Isle Of Innisfree ‘tis not.  Here’s the bio:

  Seamus Heaney was born on April 13, 1939, in Castledawson, County Derry, Northern Ireland. He earned a teacher's certificate in English at St. Joseph's College in Belfast and in 1963 took a position as a lecturer in English at that school. While at St. Joseph's he began to write, joining a poetry workshop with Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, and others under the guidance of Philip Hobsbaum. In 1965 he married Marie Devlin, and the following year he published Death of a Naturalist.
  Since then he has published hundreds more, in such collections as Opened Ground (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), which was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; The Spirit Level (1996); Selected Poems 1966-1987 (1990); and Sweeney Astray (1984). He has also written several volumes of criticism, including The Redress of Poetry (1995). Heaney's most recent translation is Beowulf (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000), which won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. He is also co-translator, with Stanislaw Baranczak, of Laments: Poems of Jan Kochanowski (1995), and co-author, with Joseph Brodsky and Derek Walcott, of a collection of essays entitled Homage to Robert Frost (1996).
  Seamus Heaney is a Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and held the chair of Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1989 to 1994. In 1995 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Heaney has been a resident of Dublin since 1976, but since 1981 he has spent part of each year teaching at Harvard University, where in 1984 he was elected the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory.

  Why he choice to smear Beowulf with his translation is beyond me. Why do mediocre poets feel an urge to translate ‘classics’ when there are usually any # of fine translations out there? Usually it’s easy money, but in SH’s case the Nobel took care of that need. Anyway, here’s the poem in question, & probably the most well known of SH’s largely forgettable corpus.

The Tollund Man

I

Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eye-lids,
His pointed skin cap.

In the flat country near by
Where they dug him out,
His last gruel of winter seeds
Caked in his stomach, 

Naked except for
The cap, noose and girdle,
I will stand a long time.
Bridegroom to the goddess,

She tightened her torc on him
And opened her fen,
Those dark juices working
Him to a saint's kept body,

Trove of the turfcutters'
Honeycombed workings.
Now his stained face
Reposes at Aarhus.

II

I could risk blasphemy,
Consecrate the cauldron bog
Our holy ground and pray
Him to make germinate 

The scattered, ambushed
Flesh of labourers,
Stockinged corpses
Laid out in the farmyards, 

Tell-tale skin and teeth
Flecking the sleepers
Of four young brothers, trailed
For miles along the lines.

III 

Something of his sad freedom
As he rode the tumbril
Should come to me, driving,
Saying the names

Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard,
Watching the pointing hands
Of country people,
Not knowing their tongue.

Out here in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.

  This is a dim sort of elegy or monody. The Tollund Man is a famed peat bog mummy- 1 of many found in northern Europe. But, what is the poem really saying? Basically, that SH identifies with the mummy. Great- but do you really need 11 quatrains to impart that? Most of the poem- especially part I- is just description. Yet, the description is so vague that 1 never really gets a sense of the ‘idea’ of why the mummy resonates with the speaker. Either add more resonance or cut the 1st part severely. Here’s the rewrite:

The Tollund Man

I

Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
His last gruel of winter seeds,
Bridegroom to the goddess,

Now his stained face
Reposes at Aarhus.

II

Consecrate the cauldron bog
Our holy ground and pray
Him to make germinate 
The scattered, ambushed

Flesh of labourers,
For miles along the lines.

III 

Something of his sad freedom
Should come to me, driving.
Saying the names
Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard,

I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.

  I tried to even out the 3 stanzas & impose a 4/2 stanzaic form to each section. It’s a little forced, but the concision makes some interesting things happen in the poem. Here are 2 of them: 1) instead of the banal Mother Earth/goddess motif we see that the goddess can now be an aspect of decay- itself. This makes the fascination/worship of the mummy more than just idle fancy, but a sacred thing, of sorts. 2) the end of the poem becomes internalized- the ‘drive’ is not literally through the mummy’s ‘turf’, but through the imagined land the speaker longs. Since we do not get any of the back story in the poem or an epigraph, moving the poem’s ‘action’ inside the speaker’s head makes sense- as there any logical inconsistencies & strained metaphors from the original can be elided as the vagaries of a mind.
  If this sort of anomic writing gets you a Nobel, then what the hell might SH be gifted with if he actually put some rumination into his poems?

Final Score: (1-100):

Seamus Heaney’s The Tollund Man: 50
TOP’s The Tollund Man: 65

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