The Grauballe Man by Seamus Heaney is a diligently detailed composition of the ‘bog body,’ scrutinized to respond to the maltreatment of the body. The poet gives a vivid description of the violence imposed upon the artifact. The poem is carefully detailed to provide almost lively imagery, which provides the poem with a gloomy and disturbing mood. Throughout the poem, Heaney uses different poetry devices to portray the vivid imagery and to reflect his views on the imaging of the dead body as opposed to the live body. The use of figures of speech such as simile and personification, connotative meaning along with imagery help to create the vivid description Heaney uniformly spreads out into the poem. The structure of the poem helps to create a rhythmic flow that smoothers the disturbing imagery.
The poet constructs the poem in stanzas with short sentences and no rhyming pattern. The enjambments in the sentences give the poem a flowing rhythmic pattern While the poet uses various repetitions of consonants such as ‘foot/root,’ he also uses an offset of vowel sounds such as ‘photograph/shoulder.’ The simple language makes the poem accessible to read, yet the use of connotative meaning, figures of speech, semantic use of words all give the poem a deeper meaning, the picture of a corpse that has been maltreated by his fellows and its passing away to the afterworld.
The poet collocates the vivid image of the Grauballe man with the ‘bog body’ that is dehumanized. The author creates the personification of the bog body that “seems to weep the black river of himself,” which stimulates the grief and pain of the Grauballe Man and exuberates the remains of the body that reflect the emotions of the poet on the dead body. Furthermore, Heaney uses similes to give the vividness to his description of the body. In the first line, he compares the lying corpse and says, “as if he had been poured in tar, he lies on a pillow of turf…”. The description of being poured in a black liquid paints a dark and gloomy image of the corpse. Heaney further likens the wrists and heels of the corpse in the lines, “The grain of his wrists/is like bog oak/the ball of his heel/like a basalt egg…” While the wrists resemble a vegetable such as ‘grain’ and ‘oak,’ the heels are likened to hard and solid rock, a black igneous rock from the mantle of the earth. While the flowing feature of this rock emphasizes the flowing structural pattern of the poem, it also connotes to the running and adhesive feature of the bog queen. Towards the end of the poem, Heaney uses another simile in the lines, “I saw his twisted face/in a photograph/a head and shoulder/out of the peat/bruised like a forceps baby…” This comparison further emphasizes the death of the Grauballe Man and its reluctance for rebirth. The imagery of a ‘twisted face’ and bruises caused through a forceps birth develops the vivid description of the dead body smothered in tar. The illustration is disturbing and even uncomfortable for the reader, which also reveals the emotional response of the poet who is scrutinizing the corpse closely.
Throughout the poem, Heaney uses the connotative meaning of various words to create a flowing structure, and also to present different purposes that add to the emotional response of the poet. In the first stanza, the poet says, “on a pillow turf/and seems to weep…” where the word ‘weep’ connotes two different meanings; first the liquid motion of water and second the emotional response of the grief of the poet. The liquidity motion of both water and tears adds to the flowing rhythm of the structure of the poem. Both the meanings also relate to the imagery of the condition of the corpse as suppurating. Despite the gloomy connotation of the word ‘weep,’ the poet uses the phrase ‘pillow of turf’ to express the eternal resting place of dead people, a place which is more serene and comforting than a deathbed. While the turf also refers to the dirt surrounding the corpse, it also connotes the peacefulness of eternal life. Thus, the subtle imagery of death manifests a disturbing and almost evil mood at the beginning of the poem.
Heaney uses the wildlife to compare the Grauballe man to the bog pools. After being in the water for a significant period, “his instep has shrunk/cold as a swan’s foot/or a wet swamp root…” His other body parts, such as the hips, are also affected by the fresh water that has wrinkled them like a mollusk; “His hips are the ridge/and purse of a mussel…” The spine of the muddy corpse resembles a motionless eel. The aqueous environment is thus used as terminology to vividly describe the changes that take place on the body once the spirit departs.
Furthermore, Heaney uses words such as ‘rusted’ and ‘mat’ to dehumanize the corpse by comparing the hair of Grauballe Man to inorganic objects. However, he also negates the dehumanization process when he likens the hair to an unborn baby. By accepting the hair as a ‘foetus’ makes the poem a controversial depiction makes the corpse is seen as a human but is not entirely. Once again, this description gives weird and disturbing imagery that resonates with the gloomy and eeriness of the corpse covered in tar. Throughout the poem, Heaney gives vivid details and resembles the body to make the picture even more disturbing and eerie than it already is. He evokes the flashes of darkness by providing sharp details of the anatomy of the Grauballe Man. These descriptions affect both the reader and the corpse because the contextual description of a corpse defamiliarizes the reader and the poet’s lively use of inorganic motionless objects defamiliarizes the corpse As a whole, the poem evokes the difference between beauty and ugly. Heaney scrutinizes the corpse to reveal the ugliness of a dead body, while also using the natural life and the perception of the afterlife to reflect on the serenity of the afterlife. The flowing motion of the spirit out of the body can be related to the flowing rhythmic pattern of the structure of the poem.