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By Seamus Heaney

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 grain 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.


His hips are the ridge
and purse of a mussel,
his spine an eel arrested
under a glisten of mud.


The head lifts,
the chin is a visor
raised above the vent
of his slashed throat


that has tanned and toughened.
The cured wound
opens inwards to a dark
elderberry place.


Who will say 'corpse'
to his vivid cast?
Who will say 'body'
to his opaque repose?


And his rusted hair,
a mat unlikely
as a foetus's.
I first saw his twisted face


in a photograph,
a head and shoulder
out of the peat,
bruised like a forceps baby,


but now he lies
perfected in my memory,
down to the red horn
of his nails,


hung in the scales
with beauty and atrocity:
with the Dying Gaul
too strictly compassed


on his shield,
with the actual weight
of each hooded victim,
slashed and dumped.


Seamus Heaney, "The Grauballe Man" from Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996. Copyright © 1999 by Seamus Heaney. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC,  http://us.macmillan.com/fsg. All rights reserved.

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Source: Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999)

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Poet Bio

Seamus Heaney
Born on a farm in Northern Ireland, Seamus Heaney received a scholarship and left his family at age 12. A widely-read and accessible poet, Heaney’s subject matter often remains with his roots—rural life in Ireland. Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 and was formerly named the prestigious Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard. See More By This Poet

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