Abstract
'A man who cannot find happiness and content in a turf-bog is a bad case', wrote Patrick Kavanagh. 'A turf-bog is a history of the world from the time of Noah.' Seamus Heaney has found in the bog both spiritual succour and political turbulence. Much critical commentary on his poem 'The Tollund Man' (Wintering Out (London, 1972)), and on the sequence of poems building on the same subject-matter in North ( London, 1975), has taken it that the poet appropriated the bog bodies, which he significantly discovered by conning his books, in order to attain a major nationalistic voice some degrees above the strong evocation of nature that was supposedly the voice of his true talent. As far as Heaney himself is concerned, the bog people first became his subject by instinct: his inspiration stemmed as much from psychic impetus, in that he perceived the possible energies of the symbol, as from intellectual choice and craft. He felt them to be something real but uncomprehended, irrational, and not available to conscious discourse.2 'The Tollund Man' works less to evoke its eponym than to register the poet's tender empathy. One conceit is central: the fact that bog-water contains tanning acids is treated in terms not only of its digestive processes preserving the deposition but also of the feminine bog receiving the male part. The crux of the poem inheres in the posture which Heaney adopts towards the man, most evidently in Sections ii and iii but more especially when in the second and third stanzas of Section I he makes this nimble shift:
Published Version
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