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‘The Tollund Man’, as is his ‘sad freedom’, seems tellingly paradoxical in loss of life – ‘naked’ and exposed, yet in some manner venerated like a ‘trove’ and a ‘bridegroom to the goddess’. He is demolished, but increased as a holy symbol of serenity after this sacrifice. This kind of peaceful fatality is emblematic of Heaney’s concerns from this poem, as he conflates the metaphorical that means of this fatality and the violent turmoil of any socially ruptured Ireland.
The explanation of the Tollund man’s head and eyelids as a ‘peat-brown head’ and ‘mild pods’ imparts a richness to his pores and skin, a physical description that is certainly evocative with the organic softness of smooth, nutrient-rich clay and the powerful ‘dark juices’ that, just like ‘juice’, appear sweet and intense. Heaney in this way describes the swamp, fen, marsh, quagmire body within a sort of obstructive ? uncooperative union in death, a quasi-divine ‘bridegroom’ to the ‘goddess’ of the earth, who ‘tighten[s] her torc on him’. The word ‘tightened’ evokes this relationship can be one of die hard devotion, it is muscular and powerful, and subsequently, Heaney depicts the bog body is experiencing a kind of sacred rebirth, with life anew in death. The alliteration in ‘tightened her torc’ imparts a solidity of rhythm to this series, which accentuates the impression that this union is certainly one of peace, even though ferocious and ardent. Because Heaney tulle at the ‘mild pods’, this kind of close focus illuminates the scale of the body’s preservation, signifies that Heaney is infatuate by this nature-defying corpse. The Tollund Guy is representational of an ineffable, preservative durability and as such, dr. murphy is the harbinger of Heaney’s later prayer to harness this kind of seemingly great power of the Tollund Guy for rebirth in his own situation.
In contrast to the tranquillity of the Tollund Man, the ‘scattered’ ‘flesh’ of labourers that Heaney desires to ‘germinate’ in part 2 is redolent with savagery and physical violence. Firstly, the reverence which Heaney goodies the Tollund Man due to the extent of his maintenance is decimated. In praying for these allergens of ‘flesh’ to ‘germinate’ like seed, Heaney means that they are like the ‘seeds’ ‘caked in [the Tollund Man’s] stomach’. This kind of creates a stunning visual graphic in which the scale the Tollund Man utterly swamps and overwhelms the meagre continues to be of the ‘young brothers’, in whose ‘skin’ is a lot like confetti, ‘flecked’ along the ‘sleepers’ of the train line which they were wiped out. They have been therefore ruthlessly massacred that they are reduced to these ‘fleck[s]’ that seem papery and lifeless in contrast with the richness of the Tollund Man’s ‘mild pods’. Heaney in this way imparts that the type of resurrection which is why he is hoping is inconceivable, and reasonless, since the ‘scattered, ambushed’ remains to be are so faraway from the wholeness and serenity Heaney extols in the Tollund Man. Because the skin and teeth are ‘trailed for kilometers along the lines’, the internal rhyming between ‘miles’ and ‘lines’ is evocative and responsive, the prolonged vowel sounds mirror the dragging and ‘trail[ing]’ in the corpses over the ‘lines’, and this way you is sonically pulled over the ‘lines’, just as the ‘young brothers’ were, and this way Heaney may wish to emphasize the savagery of the act, and engender a knowledge of this inside the reader.
Part 2 of the composition also markings a dramatic tonal move from part I, active verbs just like ‘risk’ pressure a marked contrast to the restful ‘repose’ and sluggish, seeping ‘juices’ of the earlier stanzas. This is underlined by the forceful, jinglejangle plosive sounds in ‘consecrate’ which are jarring, and provide a new seething undercurrent towards the poem, one among anger, interference, and especially, will. Heaney is now active in the poem, emotionally challenged, rather than his relaxing and unaggressive role being a voyeur partly I, as he ‘stand[s]’, enthralled by the Tollund Man. Simply I, Heaney says ‘I will go to Aarhus’, but since part II begins, a feeling of discordance is also conveyed by the word ‘could’ in line a single, as it mirrors that, in comparison, action with this situation intended for Heaney here is merely a probability. This instantly conjures in the reader a great appreciation to get the scale with the social situation in Ireland in europe, for it is definitely one of this sort of austerity that Heaney seems so caught that he is unable to work. This idea of desolation in the Irish landscape is underscored while Heaney identifies the land of Ireland being a ‘cauldron bog’. The ‘cauldron’ has associations of the occult, and of diabolism, and in this way it is as though Ireland is the ‘cauldron’ into a coven of plotting, threatening figures establishing it over a doom-filled flight of abhorrence. Furthermore, it also instils a concept that the extremely earth is poisoned and imbued with these works of political violence. This really is a particularly striking notion as Heaney snacks nature with such respect in many of his different poems, and it seems as though this natural beauty is personal. If the delicious ‘black butter’ of the globe (Bogland), has been altered into a ‘cauldron’, the audience comes to understand the size of the difficulty, it has violated the area which Heaney holds and so dear. Hence, it is understandable as to the reasons Heaney feels that his hands happen to be tied, pertaining to the problem might now be thus deeply seated in the incredibly fabric of eire, that practically nothing can be done. Once again a sense of helplessness is encapsulated in the proposed outcome of Heaney’s ‘pray[er]’, he wants to transfigure this ‘cauldron bog’ right into a ‘holy ground’. Since the associations of ‘cauldron’ are antithetic to all this kind of ‘holy’ or sacred, plus the sloppy, shapeless ‘bog’ clashes with the regular and definite ‘ground’, this kind of transformation therefore seems implausible, and Heaney depicts the fact that disparity among what Ireland should be and what it presently is, is definitely gaping, and irreconcilable.
Confirming the analogous value of the Tollund Man can be Heaney’s final proclamation that out in the ‘old man-killing parishes’ in which the Tollund Guy was wiped out, he ‘will feel shed, unhappy with home’. The seemingly paradoxical of being both ‘lost’ and ‘at home’ is solved in the idea that there are among Heaney’s native Ireland and Jutland – that the two experience violence in the name of idea, at several times. The constancy of violence renders Heaney ‘unhappy’, but there is also a pervading impression of time’s expansiveness while the poem draws into a close. Consistent with the shifting tenses of the areas of the composition (past, present and future), the poem is all-encompassing concerning time. When Heaney refers to the Tollund Man’s death-cart being a ‘tumbril’, connections are attracted with the French revolution, through which these ‘tumbril[s]’ were employed, and when Heaney describes the violence in Jutland together with the archaic ‘man-killing’, the reader can be transported back to pagan contemporary society, evoking a feeling of the old fashioned nature of these deaths. Heaney is this approach inexplicably creates that assault is an unwavering, inevitable and continuous presence in every area of your life and culture. While the immediacy of the occasions in Ireland in europe leave him ‘unhappy’, this sense of resignation to violence seems to be the only mitigator in a poem that is sobering and confronting in its study of the sociable situation in Ireland. As a result, the audience can be left to hope that Ireland may possibly one day return to being ‘holy ground’.
