politics and poetics 69tar’ (p. 28 ) and gently removed as ‘a forceps baby’ (p. 29 ). Moving
us to the twentieth century, Heaney closes with a reference to
his shield which chronicles the weight ‘of each hooded victim /
slashed and dumped’ (p. 29 ). In ‘Punishment’ the allegorical model
is taken further in the poetic dissection of the body of a woman
found in the bog with a noose around her neck, as punishment for
sexual betrayal. Heaney attempts to sexually reanimate the body
with her nipples ‘as amber beads’ and the wind ‘on her naked front’
(p. 30 ). Acutely attuned to this act of voyeurism, the confessional
tone of the poem creates an unsettling intimacy with the preserved
body. The speaker confesses that ‘I almost love you’ (p. 31 ). The
poem moves introspectively to refl ect upon modern Northern
Ireland, as the speaker interrogates his own lack of agency, regard-
ing the women tarred as punishment for their relationships with
British soldiers. He questions his own position watching the bog
woman’s sisters weeping by railings. Invariably he recognises his
own situation within the atavism of sectarian confl ict by admitting
to understanding, ‘the exact / and tribal intimate revenge’ (p. 31 ).
North divided critics; for some it glorifi ed violence and ritualised
murder. Poet Ciaran Carson wrote that Heaney was in danger of
becoming a ‘laureate of violence – a mythmaker, an anthropologist
of ritual killing, an apologist for “the situation” in the last resort,
a mystifi er’.^29 Heaney’s North could be interpreted as celebrating
what politician Conor Cruise O’Brien has pointed to in his attack
on the IRA and Sinn Fein as autocratic and fascist organisations,
mired in the ‘language of sacred soil and the cult of the dead’.^30
Heaney suggests that ‘poetry and politics are in different ways,
an articulation, an ordering, a giving to form to inchoate pieties,
prejudices world-views.’^31 In ‘Whatever You Say Say Nothing’ the
poet interrogates the language which represents Northern Ireland
in the public domain. He draws our attention to overused terms
that are in danger of becoming empty signifi ers: ‘Backlash’ and
‘crack down’, ‘Polarization’, ‘long standing hate’ and ‘the voice
of sanity’ (p. 52 ). Heaney also comments upon his own possible
compliance towards encoding politics in ‘all this art and sedentary
trade’ (p. 54 ). The poem’s title is a warning, and the work gives a
close analysis of differences between the religious communities.
Names and schools signify affi liations, encrypted politics which