paul volsik
Christian, consonantal against vocalic, masculine against feminine, a certain con-
structionof the Protestant against Catholic, North against South, narrative against
lyric, an Anglo-Saxon tradition against an Irish one in a way that has deep roots
in the nineteenth century but reworks this opposition by innovative means. One of
the possible readings of this reworking is that, paradoxically, it attempts to create
common ground between the different communities in Northern Ireland in a myth-
ical space back beyond the divisions generated by Christianity. But Heaney does
this, precisely—and perhaps dangerously—by understanding, rather than by exor-
cising, a world of seemingly unending tribal violence, a world that is continuously
confronted with monsters and the criminal. It is this that makes his poem ‘Punish-
ment’, which deals with a similar configuration to ‘The Butchers’ (the punishment
of a sexually transgressive young woman), so controversial, particularly its famous
ending that states a refusal to criticize ‘the exact|and tribal, intimate revenge’.^21
This essay will here only consider two specific areas in which the epic as a
narrative of armed violence haunts Heaney’s work: the reappropriation of the
diction of Anglo-Saxon or Germanic epic; and his translation of Beowulf,its
rewriting as an Ulster text, full of the alliterative distich line that had so excited
Herder, in some sense the objective correlative of the clash of communities and the
continuities within them.
Theconsonantal/Anglo-Saxon/Viking/JutishpoleofHeaney’sworkisevidentthr-
oughoutNorth, but perhaps the most telling example is ‘Bone Dreams’, which works
towards a fine erotic encounter between the two poles mentioned above, but begins
withareappropriationofcertainEnglishroots,lexicalaswellasmetrical,inamanner
not unlike Stephen Dedalus’s reappropriation of ‘tundish’ inPortrait of the Artist:
As dead as stone,
flint-find, nugget
of chalk,
I touch it again,
Iwinditin
the sling of mind
to pitch it at England...
·····
Ipushback
through dictions,
Elizabethan canopies.
Norman devices...
·····
to the scop’s
twang, the iron
flash of consonants
cleaving the line.^22(^21) Seamus Heaney, ‘Punishment’, inOpened Ground: Poems 1966–1996(London: Faber, 1998), 118.
(^22) Heaney, ‘Bone Dreams’, ibid. 107–8.