The Price Paid for Aestheticism: Moral Conflict and Wartime Passivity

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Julia Ziyue Peng

Mrs

IB World Literature 20

Thursday, June 14, 2012

              The Price Paid for Aestheticism: Moral Conflict and Wartime Passivity

       One of the most detestable repercussions of war is the the massacre of innocent civilians, a

truth made apparent in situations such as the Bogside Massacre, or Bloody Sunday, on January 20,

1972 in Northern Ireland, where 26 unarmed civil rights protesters and bystanders were gunned

down. It is cases like these which compel poets like Seamus Heaney to question their own role in a

political conflict as people of art. Yet it is arguable that art and politics cannot be separated;

historically, politics has played a predominant role in literature, such as the personification of

Ireland as a woman. Enforced by Irish men, the embodiment confined Irish women to purity;

enforced by English imperialists, imprisoned the Irish race into an inhibiting stereotype. In The

Tollund Man, Heaney uses imagery and the contrast between the masculine and feminine in the

ancient era versus the modern in order to highlight the internal conflict he feels between his

personal dedication to art and the public duty for political action, thus attempting to justify the

reason he yearns to write poetry for solely aesthetic purposes.

       The imagery of sacred sexuality used in describing the ritual of sacrifice to the earth is

associated with the past along with the feminine, which points to a societal acceptance of slaughter

as a method of primitive agricultural gain. The first section of The Tollund Man begins in the

theoretical future, with the speaker making a promise to “someday” visit the bog man (Heaney,

line 1). As the section progresses, there is a shift backwards through time, from when the speaker
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describes the discovery of the bog man in the “flat county”, to when the man is first sacrificed, and

to when the earth “tightened her torc on him and opened her fen” to accept his cold flesh (Heaney,

lines 5-13). The acceptance itself is a direct and startling contrast to contemporary Ireland, where

the bodies of those killed during war are not taken in by the earth, but rather scattered as rotting

corpses. The depiction of the buried ancient victim indicates he is already a part of the earth, as his

head is “peat-brown”, his eyelids are “pods” of vegetation, and he has a “gruel of winter seeds” in

his stomach, thus carrying the potential for germination (Heaney, lines 2-7). From this, the

willingness of the goddess earth to receive the male victim as her bridegroom points to a violent

love making as she uses her “dark juices” to preserve his body like a saint’s; violent because of the

very nature of ritual slaughtering. However, it is apparent that while the act of paganish offering is

savage and barbaric, the well-preserved body is indicative of a state of undisturbed restfulness

even centuries after the immolation. The community of humans the Tollund man belonged to

believed wholeheartedly in the benefit of surrendering one individual for the prosperity of the

group in the period of ensuing agricultural abundance. The past is associated with the feminine,

not only because of the dominance of nature, but also due to the means by which the earth took in

and objectified the male so readily in her role as the archetypal woman, which contrasts with the

political violence that manifests in the masculine modern society in the following stanzas. In a

speech examining the symbolism of bogs and their significance, Heaney stated that the

interwovenness of “the past, the sense of land, and the sense of identity” for the Irish people was

“inextricable” (Collins 17). The duality of gender thus represents the duality of tradition and

modernity. The similarities Heaney draws from the Tollund man and the lacerated face of

contemporary Ireland include the extermination of everyday civilians with a “certain ritualistic
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dimension”, which makes Heaney feel “a kinship with a landscape that has witnessed similar

conflict and killings” (The Tollund Man by Seamus Heaney).

       Yet despite encountering consolation in situational similarities, the speaker of the poem

never experiences the feeling of resolution upon reaching the poem’s conclusion. Instead, he states

he will still “feel lost, unhappy, and at home” (Heaney, lines 43-44). The very irony of these last

two lines illustrates the speaker’s growing sense of internal conflict as he begins to realize there

are perhaps more differences between Jutland and Ireland than there are similarities. Towards the

end of the first section, the speaker moves back to the present from the past, immersing himself

once again into a landscape that rejects the bodies of slaughtered innocents, instead leaving them

to “trail for miles along the lines” as “scattered and stockinged corpses” (Heaney, lines 25-28). The

polarity between the modern and the ancient is quite apparent. Instead of appeasing agriculture, the

sacrificed are trying to appease politics, a predominantly male field. Indeed, political struggle and

violence throughout history have been almost exclusively male, even in literature, where men have

manipulated language to depict women as immortalized objects of beauty to establish their own

power and control. Thus there is a direct contrast between the imagery of the feminine natural past

with the masculine political modernity of civil war. The feminized history, therefore, has been

“usurped by a violent male cult” (Green 7). Assuredly, the lurching syntax and rhythm in section

two while describing scenes of war presents the reader with a sense of unsettling instability. This

literary feature is then combined with the consonance of words such as “scattered”, “stockinged”,

and “flecking” - words found earlier when the same violence of sacrifice of the bog man was

described with diction such as “caked” and “naked” (Heaney lines 8-30). The parallel between the

violence of Irish modernity and Jutland ancientness is established, but the parallel structure itself is
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fragile. The similarities terminate the moment the earth decided to leave the flesh of labourers to

rot in the open air after their terrible maiming, an open contrast to the structured rite of earthly

acceptance. The bridegroom bog man will inevitably bring “alleviation of pain”, unlike the “four

young brothers killed shamefully, resulting only in more turmoil and bloodshed” (The Tollund

Man by Seamus Heaney). The bog man died believing his death will serve a purpose, so that his

family would reap the harvest’s rewards; the civilian casualties of Ireland’s fighting died

unknowing and without a cause. In order for there to be a kind of compensation, the feminine

needs to be renewed once again to escape the patriarchal and imbalanced hold of the masculine.

One major recurring theme in Heaney’s poetry is “man must learn to trust woman” (Green 5). The

two genders in Heaney himself are battling with each other, and through the use of imagery and

contrast to emphasize the differences between gender association through time, Heaney is

beginning to understand this inner struggle.

       Like most artists caught in midst of the devastation of a political game of glory and status,

Heaney tries and fails to reconcile the binary concepts pitted against each other. He states that

many times he felt “owed to the desk like some monk bowed over his prie-dieu … in an attempt to

bear his portion of the weight of the world”, all the while “knowing himself incapable of heroic

virtue or redemptive effect, but constrained by his obedience to his rule to repeat the effort and

posture” (Heaney). In other words, he tries to balance personal art with public action as he plays a

role of the passive bystander to atrocities. In the last stanza, there is a certain tone of

incompleteness as Heaney takes into consideration the previous two stanzas that juxtapose the past

with the present. The speaker is lost in a desert of loneliness and contemplation with “sad

freedom” and the imagery of a “country people not knowing their tongue” (Heaney, lines 33-40).
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The desolation the speaker experiences as he attempts to cope with his inability or unwillingness

to partake in political struggle, yet bearing witness to the horrific aftermath of his inaction, is best

characterized by the connotation and imagery of isolation. The sad freedom and a lost country of

people result in the speaker wandering around where he promised he would be: the “old man-

killing parishes” where he feels “lost, unhappy”, yet strangely “at home” because his inaction

caused him to become accustomed and desensitized to three decades of daily violence. He tries to

find that solace by reaching out into the long lost feminine past, to prove to himself that Ireland is

only a small tragedy in a sea of tragedies, yet he cannot place the civil war in the rifts of time.

Therefore, the only comfort the speaker can receive is from rejecting the utilitarian role of poetry

as “a diagram of political attitudes” (Adams 228), and to rather focus on just creating aestheticism

for the sake of aestheticism itself.

        The battle between the intimacy of Seamus Heaney’s poetry and the public war of Irish

nationalism upturns Heaney’s deeply held belief that poetry exists as an island of solidarity. As a

male poet, he cannot withdraw himself completely from politics, and struggles with the internal

conflict of art versus game of power. The finding of the Tollund man provided Heaney with an

opportunity to examine the reason he retreats from political struggle. By using imagery and the

contrast between the masculine and the feminine, he makes a statement that underlines the most

consequential contrast between the sacrifice of the Tollund man and the sacrifice of Irish farmers:

that modern sacrifices do not serve a clear, distinct political gain, while the ancient sacrifices

perpetuated faith and agricultural reaping. In the end, Heaney does not reach any kind of

settlement as he is still yet lost in between two lands and eras, himself forever a victim of his own

country’s violence.
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                                         Works Cited

Adams, Hazard. The Offense of Poetry. Washington: the University of Washington Press, 2007.

         Print.

Collins, Floyd. Seamus Heaney: The Crisis of Identity. Cranbury: Rosemont Publishing & Printing

         Corp, 2003. Print

Green, Carlanda. The Feminine Principle in Seamus Heaney’s Poetry. Unknown. N.d. Print.

Heaney, Seamus. “Crediting Poetry”. The Nobel Prize in Literature 1995. Sweden. 7 Dec. 1995.

Unknown. “The Tollund Man by Seamus Heaney”. Neo English. N.p. 25 Dec. 2010. Web. 13 Jun.

         2012.