Contemporary Poetry

68 contemporary poetry

and Paul Muldoon’s Quoof ( 1983 ), articulates an inherent scepti-
cism towards the poet as polemicist, but a respect for the ethical
questions poetry raises.^26 Heaney asserts that during The Troubles
poetry served a marginal but important countercultural role whose
language was an antidote to sectarian rhetoric:

The fact that a literary action was afoot was itself a new

political condition, and the poets did not feel the need to

address themselves to the specifi cs of politics because they

assumed that the tolerances and subtleties of their art were

precisely what they had to set against the repetitive intoler-

ance of public life. When Derek Mahon, Michael Longley,

James Simmons and myself were having our fi rst book pub-

lished, Paisley was already in full sectarian cry and Northern

Ireland’s cabinet ministers regularly massaged the atavisms of

Orangemen on the twelfth of July.^27

The archaeologist P. V. Glob’s The Bog People ( 1965 ) pro-
vided Heaney with accounts of bodies dug up accidentally by
Scandinavian turf cutters, as well as evidence of ritualistic murder
and burial in the Iron Age. In Wintering Out ( 1972 ) this exposure
to Glob’s book became the basis for a poem regarding sacrifi cial
murder, ‘Tollund Man’. However, in North the exhumation of the
bodies serves as an acute political allegory for the sectarian violence
of Northern Ireland. Heaney is explicit about the political analogy:

Taken in relation to the tradition of Irish political martyr-

dom, for that cause whose icon is Kathleen Ni Houlihan,

this is more than an archaic barbarous rite; it is an archetypal

pattern. And the unforgettable photographs of these victims

blended in my mind with photographs of atrocities, past

and present in the long rites of Irish political and religious

struggles.^28

This element of simultaneity is evident in ‘The Grauballe Man’.
Found in Jutland, Denmark the man had had his throat slashed. As
Heaney depicts: ‘The head lifts / the chin is a visor raised above
the vent’ (p. 28 ). Grauballe Man looks as if he had ‘been poured in