Seamus Heany Grauballe Man

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Violence of Man The poem “The Grauballe Man” is a look at the brutality and beauty of our world’s violent history. This bog body that we have named Grauballe Man was found in Denmark in 1952, and had been laying, waiting, for over three millennia to be found. The bog in which he was entombed contained natural preservatives that kept him whole so that someday we may find him and learn more about the world, and ourselves. Seamus Heaney wrote this poem and dedicated it to the Grauballe Man in hopes that we would step back and look at our own past, however brutal it may be. In the first few lines of the poem, the poet gives the deceased body emotion. As if he had been poured in tar, he lies on a pillow of turf and seems to weep the black river of himself. The word “weep” is emotionally strong and gives the emotion of extreme sorrow. He was poured into this bog which means he had no choice in the action. Because of that forced death, the Grauballe Man is weeping in the blackened tar as he lays in his sticky prison for years and years to come. I think the next line connects with this first stanza even though it’s separated. The break in stanzas could perhaps represent a passage of time. It took three millennia to find his remains, and during that time his weeping and his crying turned into a river. For all that time, he had been trapped in a void of his own blackened sorrow where his suffering only grew. The break could also intensify the emotion and draw the reader’s eye to the word “weep”. Continuing after “The black river of himself” the poet uses multiple images to convey a sense of nature, or a compatibility with the land: The grains of his wrists is like bog oak, the ball of his heel like a basalt egg. His instep has shrunk cold as a swan’s foot or a wet swamp root. The Grauballe man takes on the image of being
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