30 a mat unlikely as a foetus's. 1 first saw his twisted face
in a photograph, a head and shoulder 35 out of the peat, bruised like a forceps baby,
but now he lies perfected in my memory, down to the red horn
40 of his nails,
hung in the scales with beauty and atrocity: with the Dying Gaul2 too strictly compassed
45 on his shield, with the actual weight of each hooded victim, slashed and dumped.
Punishment1
I can feel the tug of the halter at the nape
2. Roman marble reproduction of a Greek bronze naked in the hole in the peat, a bandage over the sculpture depicting a wounded soldier of Gaul, eyes and a collar round the neck. The band across whose matted hair identifies him as a Celt, in the eyes was drawn tight and had cut into the neck Rome's Capitoline Museum. and the base of the nose. We may feel sure that it 1. In 195 1 the peat-stained body of a young girl, had been used to close her eyes to this world. There who lived in the late 1st century C.E., was recov-was no mark of strangulation on the neck, so that ered from a bog in Windeby, Germany. As P. V. it had not been used for that purpose.' Her hair Glob describes her in 77le Bog People, she 'lay 'had been shaved off with a razor on the left side
.
PUNISHMENT / 2827
of her neck, the wind on her naked front.
It blows her nipples to amber beads, it shakes the frail rigging of her ribs.
I can see her drowned
body in the bog, the weighing stone, the floating rods and boughs.
Under which at first she was a barked sapling that is dug up oak-bone, brain-firkin:0 small cask
her shaved head like a stubble of black corn, her blindfold a soiled bandage,
her noose a ring
to store the memories of love. Little adultress, before they punished you
you were flaxen-haired, undernourished, and your tar-black face was beautiful. My poor scapegoat,
I almost love you
but would have cast, I know, the stones of silence. I am the artful voyeur
of your brain's exposed and darkened combs,0 valley's your muscles' webbing and all your numbered bones:
I who have stood dumb when your betraying sisters, cauled? in tar, wrapped, enclosed
wept by the railings,
of the head. . . . When the brain was removed the adulterous women by shaving off their hair and convolutions and folds of the surface could be then scourging them out of the village or killing clearly seen [Glob reproduces a photograph of her them. More recently, her 'betraying sisters' were brain].... This girl of only fourteen had had an sometimes shaved, stripped, tarred, and hand- inadequate winter diet. .. . To keep the young cuffed by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) to the body under, some birch branches and a big stone railings of Belfast in punishment for keeping comwere laid upon her.' According to the Roman his-pany with British soldiers. torian Tacitus, the Germanic peoples punished
.
282 8 / SEAMUS HEANEY
who would connive in civilized outrage yet understand the exact and tribal, intimate revenge.
1975
Casualty
I
He would drink by himself And raise a weathered thumb Towards the high shelf, Calling another rum
5 And blackcurrant, without Having to raise his voice, Or order a quick stout0 strong dark beer By a lifting of the eyes And a discreet dumb-show
10 Of pulling off the top; At closing time would go In waders and peaked cap Into the showery dark, A dole- kept1 breadwinner
15 But a natural for work. I loved his whole manner, Sure-footed but too sly, His deadpan sidling tact, His fisherman's quick eye
20 And turned observant back. Incomprehensible To him, my other life. Sometimes, on his high stool, Too busy with his knife
25 At a tobacco plug And not meeting my eye In the pause after a slug0 gulp of liquor He mentioned poetry. We would be on our own 30 And, always politic And shy of condescension, I would manage by some trick To switch the talk to eels Or lore of the horse and cart 35 Or the Provisionals.2
But my tentative art His turned back watches too: He was blown to bits Out drinking in a curfew
1. I.e., receiving unemployment benefits. 2. The Provisional branch of the IRA.
