The Grauballe Man

"The Grauballe Man" by Seamus Heaney

As if he had been poured
in tar, he lies
on a pillow of turf
and seems to weep

⁵ the black river of himself.
The grain of his wrists
is like bog oak,
the ball of his heel

like a basalt egg.
¹⁰ His instep has shrunk
cold as a swan’s foot
or a wet swamp root.

His hips are the ridge
and purse of a mussel,
¹⁵ his spine an eel arrested
under a glisten of mud.

The head lifts,
the chin is a visor
raised above the vent
²⁰ of his slashed throat

that has tanned and toughened.
The cured wound
opens inwards to a dark
elderberry place.

²⁵ Who will say ‘corpse’
to his vivid cast?
Who will say ‘body’
to his opaque repose?

And his rusted hair,
³⁰ a mat unlikely
as a foetus’s.
I 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 Gaul
too strictly compassed

⁴⁵ on his shield,
with the actual weight
of each hooded victim,
slashed and dumped.

In "The Grauballe Man", Heaney addresses a phenomena known as the "bog bodies", bodies of victims that had been preserved for hundreds of years, some since even the Iron Age, due to the natural chemicals in bogs. Heaney had been deeply struck by the bodies, which he first saw in a photograph, as the poem suggests, and later for himself. They became the subject of several of his poems, including "The Tollund Man" and "Bogland". Heaney gave his reason for his preoccupation with the bodies by explaining that the photographs of the bog victims reminded him of photographs of atrocities in the many Irish political and religious struggles. I thought it was fascinating that Heaney attempted to convey the complex emotions the bog bodies evoked in him through his poems. He does so with such skill in this poem that the speaker's struggle with the grotesque beauty of the body is both vivid and compelling.

A description of the "Grauballe Man" and images - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grauballe_Man

A description of the "Dying Gaul" and images - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_Gaul

Literary Terms

1. Enjambment: The entire poem reflects a successful employment of enjambment. Almost all of the lines are ended well before the sentence is over, giving the poem a dramatic, halting rhythm, with a sense of heavy solemnity that reflects the morbid subject.

2. Parallelism: The seventh stanza uses parallelism to add emphasis to the surreal nature of the subject: "Who will say 'corpse' / to his vivid cast? / Who will say 'body' / to his opaque repose?" (25-28), it asks, referencing the realistic appearance of the preserved man. The parallel structure of the sentences enables the two questions to stand out from the rest of the poem, and the identical beginning of each better contrasts the ends, "vivid cast" (26) with "opaque repose" (28). This contrast is another form of illustration of the complex fate of the body, which has been dead for many years and yet is disturbingly lifelike.

3. Allusion: The entire poem is an allusion to the 1952 discovery of a bog body in Denmark that had been nearly perfectly preserved for over two millennia. The body was put on display and was known as "The Grauballe Man", which the title directly references. Another allusion present in the poem is more subtle; the speaker mentions "the Dying Gaul" (43), which is actually the name of a famous sculpture that depicts a wounded Celtic warrior who is close to death. The pose of the sculpture is reminiscent of that of the bog man, which might have been the root of the reference.

4. Simile: As he attempts to describe the incredible phenomena of the preserved body, the speaker has to resort to simile. "The grain of his wrists / is like bog oak, / the ball of his heel / like a basalt egg" (6-9) he states, or "cold as a swan's foot" (11). The comparisons make an effort to give a vivid picture of the body by summoning more familiar images to mind.