Text of the Poem | The Tollund Man By Seamus Heaney | Eureka Study Aids

I

1. Some day I will go to Aarhus

2. To see his peat-brown head, 

3. The mild pods of his eye-lids, 

4. His pointed skin cap. 

5. In the flat country near by

6. Where they dug him out, 

7. His last gruel of winter seeds

8. Caked in his stomach, 

9. Naked except for

10. The cap, noose and girdle, 

11. I will stand a long time. 

12. Bridegroom to the goddess, 

13. She tightened her torc on him

14. And opned her fen, 

15. Those dark juices working

16. Him to a saint's kept body, 

17. Throve of the turfcutters'

18. Honeycombed workings. 

19. Now his stained face

20. Reposes at Aarhus. 

II

21. I could risk blasphemy, 

22. Consecrate the cauldron bog

23. Our holy ground and pray

24. Him to make germinate

25. The scattered, ambushed

26. Flesh of labourers, 

27. Stockinged corpses

28. Laid out in the farmyards, 

29. Tell-tale skin and teeth

30. Flecking the sleepers 

31. Of four young brothers, trailed

32. For miles along the lines. 

III

33. Something of his sad freedom

34. As he rode the tumbril

35. Should come to me, driving, 

36. Saying the names

37. Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard, 

38. Watching the pointing hads

39. Of country people, 

40. Not knowing their tongue. 

41. Out here in Jutland

42. In the old man-killing parishes

43. I will feel lost, 

44. Unhappy and at home.