Punishment

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1975

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

Like many postmodern poems, and Heaney’s in particular, “Punishment” does not use a specific rhyme or meter. However, “Punishment” does utilize elements of sound and set stanzaic and line lengths. The poem is broken into four-line stanzas, or quatrains. Quatrains are notable for their connection to ballads and other musically-inclined forms of poetry or verse. Heaney’s use of quatrains is modernized by a lack of set rhyme and a focus on sound movement.

Rather than the lines ending on specific sounds or end-rhymes, “Punishment” is notable for its use of internal rhyme and onomatopoeic properties. The poem is heavy on long, internal vowel sounds, giving the piece a sense of doom, fear, or pain. For example, the repeated long vowel sounds of "drowned" (Line 9), "body in the bog" (Line 10), "stone" (Line 11) and "floating rods and boughs" (Line 12) of the third stanza. The long vowels are reminiscent of a keening, wailing, or howling. The line lengths are all roughly the same, with almost every line possessing between three and six beats. The poem itself is broken into 11 stanzas, which mathematically implies a sense of constancy or continuance.

Kennings

Notably, Heaney uses several kennings in “Punishment.” A kenning is a figure of speech made up of compound words with multiple meanings. Kennings are typically figurative in nature and are most common in Old Norse and Old English poetry. Kennings are not commonly used in modern English verse. Because bog bodies are commonly found in Northern Europe, the use of kennings is likely an artistic choice meant to mimic the styles of ancient poetry in Northern Europe. Heaney uses several kennings, including “oak-bone, brain-firkin” in line 16, as well as “flaxen-haired” (Line 25) and “tar-black” (Line 27).

While kennings are unusual in modern and contemporary poetry, they were used to add figurative connotations to nouns in Old English, Old Norse, and other ancient dialects and languages. Kennings usually consist of a base word and a determinant. In modern English, kennings typically combine a common noun with a descriptor that is both literal and figurative.

Assonance

Assonance is used throughout “Punishment” to create particular sound effects relevant to the thematic undertones of the poem’s content. Assonance is the repeated use of vowel sounds within words or phrases. Heaney does this throughout “Punishment,” but it is particularly obvious in stanza three: “I can see her drowned / body in the bog, / the weighing stone, / the floating rods and boughs” (Lines 9-12). Several words in this stanza contain similar ‘o’ sounds, both long and short: drowned, body, bog, stone, floating, rods, and boughs. These types of sounds also appear consistently throughout the poem as a whole.

The effect of Heaney’s use of assonance is haunting. The vowels, usually long and made longer still in specific accents or dialects of English, become a drone, long and painful, that calls back to the pain of the woman from the bog. Heaney’s use of assonance gives the poem a sense of pain, as if the words are a long, drawn-out cry for help.