Seamus Heaney

The Tollund Man

I Some day I will go to Aarhus* To see his peat-brown head, The mild pods of his eye-lids, His pointed skin cap. In the flat country near by Where they dug him out, His last gruel of winter seeds Caked in his stomach, Naked except for The cap, noose and girdle, I will stand a long time. Bridegroom to the goddess, She tightened her torc on him And opened her fen, Those dark juices working Him to a saint's kept body, Trove of the turfcutters' Honeycombed workings. Now his stained face Reposes at Aarhus. II I could risk blasphemy, Consecrate the cauldron bog Our holy ground and pray Him to make germinate The scattered, ambushed Flesh of labourers, Stockinged corpses Laid out in the farmyards, Tell-tale skin and teeth Flecking the sleepers Of four young brothers, trailed For miles along the lines. III Something of his sad freedom As he rode the tumbril Should come to me, driving, Saying the names Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard, Watching the pointing hands Of country people, Not knowing their tongue. Out here in Jutland In the old man-killing parishes I will feel lost, Unhappy and at home. *Heaney purposely writes that he will go to Aarhus to see the Tollund Man even though he knows that he is on display in Silkeborg, Denmark. But in Heaney's opinion "Aarhus" goes better with the metrical feet. The famous Irish poet and Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney wrote an extract of his famous poem "The Tollund Man" in the guest book for Silkeborg Museum in 1973. Seamus Heaney gave a talk at Silkeborg Museum in 1996, where he described his childhood memories of the bog: "When I was a child and an adolescent I lived among peat-diggers and I also worked in the peat bog myself. I loved the structure the peat bank revealed after the spade had worked its way through the surface of the peat. I loved the mystery and silence of the place when the work was done at the end of the day and I would stand there alone while the larks became quiet and the lapwings started calling, while a snipe would suddenly take off and disappear. . . " About his poem - Bogland - Seamus Heaney told the following: "The title of the poem refers to the bogs I knew while I was growing up and the stories I had heard about the things that could be preserved in the bog such as supplies of butter that were kept there, and about the things that were even more astonishing to a child, such as the skeleton of an Irish elk which our neighbours had dug out".