and the spirit-level serve as metaphors that avoid polarization; always
in the middle, they chart a space of balance. At the risk of pinning
down the rhizome, it can be understood as a metaphor for the in-
between, a hybrid system of interrelating differences, as an
unsystematic nomadicity that explores borderlines. Bearing in mind
the metaphor of the rhizome, the dynamics of deterritorialization can
be explored further in Heaneyís poem ëTollundí.
ëTollundí was written shortly after the IRA cease-fire in
September 1994 and revisits ëThe Tollund Maní, published in 1972.
Whereas the earlier poem looks to the roots of the countryside and the
quaking sod of bogland from where the Tollund man is unearthed, the
later poem develops imagery of routes, of travelling through a Danish
landscape in a way that is evocative of ëMaking Strangeí: ëThat
Sunday morning we had travelled far [...]í across ë[a] path through
Jutland fields. Light traffic sound.í Visiting the landscape which is
imagined in ëThe Tollund Maní, the speaker notices how things ë[h]ad
been resituated and landscaped,/ With tourist signs in futhark runic
script/ In Danish and in English. Things had moved on.í The
landscape is reinscribed by tourist signs written in both Danish and
English, and so the landscape is translated for foreigners from ancient
runic letters. Things move on as there are ëbyroadsí moving off and
the figures in the poem are presented as ëfootlooseí. In ëTollundí there
is a sense of space, movement and freedom, found less in the static,
close-up and claustrophobic descriptions that charaterize part one of
ëThe Tollund Maní. Whereas ëThe Tollund Maní is written in the
anticipatory future tense of ë[s]omeday I will goí, this future space is
finally got to when the speaker arrives in Scandinavia in the present
tense of ëTollundí. ëTollundí carefully records in the present tense the
moment of ëSeptember 1994í and rewrites the future imagined past in
ëThe Tollund Maní. The political climate of the cease-fire and
movement towards the thinking of the Belfast Agreement may well
explain the more optimistic tone of the latter poem.
The end of ëTollundí connects walking abroad with freedom and
finding oneís identity. The feminine endings have the effect of the
lines over-spilling themselves or refusing to be contained. While
repetition in the final line on ëagainí and the abruptness of ënot badí,
evokes the sense of the poem not really ending properly but carrying
on like the speakers, walking into silence and space:
grace
(Grace)
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