Punishment (1975)

The first half of the poem takes place in the past. It describes the exhumation of a fourteen year old girl's body in Germany, 1951. The girl was believed to have been stoned by her peers for committing adultery. The girls body was preserved in the mud for two thousand years. Heaney uses language to describe the “little adultress's” corpse, which was preserved in the mud over two thousand years, in a vulnerable way—nape, neck, nipples, ribs. Heaney clearly feels sympathy towards the slain girl.

The second half of the poem happens in Heaney's present time as he speaks of a women in his village who was shunned by the other women in the village for having an alleged affair with a British soldier. Heaney uses the final few stanzas to convey remorse not standing up for that women and reflects on how humanity has not changed in two thousand years. Our instinctive, tribal behavior has been preserved as the girl's body. Punishment presents a challenging question—is humanity ever truly civilized?