"Punishment" by Seamus Heaney....and some thoughts

I value a good poem.
A good poem makes you think, should make you feel something, and one should not be indifferent about its content.
This poem is a good poem (I think so at least) because it managed to stick inside my head also after the lecture about postwar poetry. But why this and not one of the others?

It would be wrong to say that it was better than anything else on my curriculum that very day, but it was certainly not worse. I must say that its simple pictures, painted with simple words made it memorable.
I touched my very soul, and when our teacher told us the story behind it, it immediately became one of my favourites.

I'm not that familiar with Heaney's poetry, but after reading this I will look more closely at it, and I will start out with the collection which this poem is a part of; "North"
But no more philosophical outburst, I will save them for later....

Punishment


I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
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:

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,
your muscles' webbing
and all your numbered bones:

I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,

who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.

So...what do you think? Did it make any sense to you?
Some poems are more closely linked to a story outside its own words, connected to the context of the author himself.
In this poem, past meets present in a very delicate, but still agonising picture of words.
Past is represented by the remains of a girl that was found in a bog in 1951. The police thought she had been murdered, and indeed she was...as a tribal sacrifice to Mother Earth in the Iron Age. But as one reads the poem one can see clearly that this woman was accused of something, but probably innocent. The charge was adultery.

But there's more beneath the surface of this poem, and it is that story that makes the poem even more memorable. Adultery can be different things; to be unfaithful to your spouse...but also being unfaithful to your country. The case is the story of those young women in Northern Ireland who perhaps fell in love with some English soldiers, or just were friends with them. This was nothing less than treason to some, and the IRA acted out their punishment by shaving their heads, beating them and in some cases killing them as a warning to any "lost soul" that could stray over to the enemy...

But the poem goes outside the boundaries of the author, his home and context.
Because these kinds of punishments have been acted out through the history of men whenever there is a conflict going on.
The women who fell in love with German soldiers during the second world war here in Norway were treated equally; they were seen as traitors, lowlifes, forever to be shun and hated for what they did.
They were called "Tyskertøser" which means German-whores...They were being expelled from Norway, put into internment-camp and their children suffered greatly in the years after the war.


And there's a question rising in my mind: If we could not do anything to protect them in the past, should we not try today?
And one more thing: Who can change the course of love? Neither of us decides who we fall in love with, and no boundaries are able to stop us when our minds have been made up. Just look at Romeo and Juliet.....