VCE Literary Brilliance

Lucy Noronha

Stephen Milligan  

Teacher - Literature

Year-end assessment sees Year 11 VCE Literature students undergo examination.  As part of this exam, students must read and annotate three poems and then write a close analysis of the language used in the poems. 

Students do not know which poems they will be given in the exam,  but the poems are  chosen from a group of poems studied in formative assessment in Unit 2. 

Lucy Noronha completed the following essay as part of her end of year exam in VCE Literature Unit 2. The three focus poems - Limbo, Punishment and Act of Union  - are attached in pdf document for readers' reference.  We recommend that readers consider the poems, and then read Lucy's response below.

Lucy scored 100% for this assessment. 

Teacher feedback is also included at the end of essay.

Lucy Noronha

Year 11

Seamus Heaney’s Opened Ground condemns sectarian violence as a force which is especially subjugating towards women who are oppressed by more powerful forces – either an omnipresent higher power, or privileged men. Paradoxically soothing and sinister sibilant language evokes images of purgatory, whilst gruesome metaphors and religious motifs juxtapose fictional female suffering with contemporaneous gendered violence experienced by Northern Irish women during the hostile ‘Troubles’ of the 1960’s and 70’s.

Through purgatorial allusions, the climax of Limbo is foreshadowed as desperate measures being taken to avoid an eternal void state of limbo. The title implies that religion will be a key aspect of the poem and likely a weapon that characters must fight against. This suggestion is further conveyed through the sibilant ‘s’ and ‘sh’ sounds of the ‘fishermen at Ballyshannon’ who discover the horror of an ‘infant’ ‘netted’ ‘along with the salmon’. These ‘sh’ sounds mimic the flow of the waves, implying an Atlantic Ocean seaside setting. However, despite this peaceful lulling sound, a menacing atmosphere is evoked when the revelation of a dead child unfolds. Paradoxically, the sibilant sounds take on a sinister suggestion as this death was caused in reaction to ‘an illegitimate spawning’. The verb ‘spawning’ connotes something inhumane being created and subverts the usually neutral or positive descriptions associated with gestation. This connotation depicts this child as rejected, and given Heaney’s contemporaneous context of the sectarian Troubles, the reason for this child’s ‘illegitima[cy]’ likely stems from either lack of wedlock or a cross-denominational affair (or a mix of the two), as women were punished for both. The eerie content of the poem about a desperate and naïve attempt at salvation for this sinful child is revealed by the religious connotation of the title – the action the mother takes is the only way to save this child’s soul and save him from a purgatorial ‘limbo’, ensuring his journey to ‘paradise’ through baptism. 

Christ-like symbolism and macabre imagery portray this feat of baptism as fatal, both to the child who is lost to infanticide and the unnamed protagonist who is spiritually wounded by her metaphorical weapon of a child. This depiction is evident in the mother’s subverted and paradoxical feelings towards her son. His youthful innocence is connoted through his depiction as a metaphorical ‘small one’ she delicately ‘[ducks]’ ‘tenderly’ in the ‘shallows’. However, this seemingly loving attempt at baptism is converted into something dangerous and devastating, as the ‘frozen knobs’ of the mother’s ‘wrists’ reveal that this once caring act has quickly metamorphosised into an uncontrollable frenzy to the point where her ‘wrists’ were ‘dead as the gravel’. This simile highlights that the mother is hurting both herself and drowning her baby as she cannot stop the naïve attempt at baptism, which she has been denied in an official setting. The pain the mother is inflicting upon her child mirrors the emotional and social destruction his existence is causing her. The reflection is evident in the child being a metaphorical ‘minnow’ – a small fish, connoting innocence while alluding to Jesus Christ. However, this figurative fish has deadly ‘hooks’ ‘tearing’ the mother’s heart ‘open’ as she must give him salvation to save the reputation he has lacerated. Likewise, in Act of Union, the paradoxical sexual and political congress enacted by the ‘imperially male’ narrator, results in a ‘parasitical’ child acting as a hostile force against a parent’s conscience. After the ‘pulse’ where a yonic ‘ferny bed’ was ‘[broken open]’, the resultant child represents the convergence of the maternal Ireland and the paternal Britain culminating in the ‘heart’ of a metaphorical ‘wardrum’ ‘mustering force’, preparing to strike against his absent father ‘across the water’. The unborn child not only elicits fear in the father, but also the abused woman, as his existence ‘leaves her raw’ like the titular ‘opened ground’. The visceral ‘breaking’ open of these women problematises the harsh and oppressive stigmas placed upon women generally in this context – one which led to social isolation, as well as physical pain and humiliation, evident in women like the subject in Punishment who broke social norms and was tarred and feathered by the IRA in Northern Ireland. 

The final two quatrains of Limbo highlight the guilt and shame for violent acts stemming from sectarian violence – a guilt and shame overridden by the overwhelming desire to obtain power. Following the infanticide, the woman visualised ‘the sign of [the] cross’ of Christ, who she ultimately aims to appease and metaphorically carries as a token of her faith as she ‘[wades]’ into the harsh ‘shallows’ to be ‘hauled’ into a purgatorial ‘limbo’ with the child she failed to save. The verb ‘wade’ connotes a physical struggle pushing through the water which reflects an internal battle within the mother of whether to return to her community who condemned her, or face the fate that God prepared for her. Her grief and reverence towards Christ wins as she joins her son in the ‘cold glitter of souls’ moving towards the ‘far briny zone’ of an eternal purgatorial void where ‘Christ’s palms’ ‘cannot’ reach her and she will finally be free of the oppressive society who metamorphosised her into a villain. Similarly, in Punishment, the ‘drowned’ and shamed ‘little adulteress’ elicits a sense of complicity in the unnamed male narrator. Likely, a motivation for the mother’s suicide in Limbo was her shame at the resentment she held towards one she supposedly loved. Likewise, the self-titled ‘artful voyeur’ in Punishment ‘almost [loves]’ the condemned woman who he possessively claims as his ‘poor scapegoat’. Despite this, he paradoxically knows he ‘would have cast’ the metaphorical ‘stones of silence’ which annihilated this once ‘beautiful’ woman. The narrator feels a yearning for the exhumed bog body of the Windeby Girl, whilst also feeling a resentment for her so poignant that he believes he would ‘[stand] dumb’ when such ‘tribal’ and ‘intimate revenge’ was carried out. Heaney juxtaposes this complicity with contemporaneous realities where women, degraded and tied to poles, caught in the crossfires of cross-denominational conflict, were ignored by bystanders who made no attempt to assist or even acknowledge these condemned women. This perhaps reflects a confession of Heaney himself in feeling both disgust and understanding in such events. However, through the collection Opened Ground, he chooses to exhume these stories to problematise these turbulent times in Northern Ireland. In contrast, the narrator in Act of Union feels perverse pleasure in the ‘big pain’ he has caused. The phallic symbol of the ‘battering ram’ raping the personified ‘eastern coast’ of the motherland Ireland, is acknowledged by the narrator as what ‘[leaves]’ the ‘pain’. Despite condemning his ‘conquest’ and being fearful of its emotional and political ‘legacy’, which ‘culminates inexorably’, ‘no treaty’ of his attempts to ‘salve’ this pain in any way. This alludes to the 1801 Act of Union which occurred despite the visceral subjugation and literal and figurative pain this imperial congress caused the Irish after the agrarian rebellion of 1798, as depicted in Requiem for the Croppies.

Heaney’s poems utilise paradoxically soothing and sinister aural sibilance in conjunction with macabre imagery and religious metaphors to illuminate to Irish and British society how problematic contemporary sectarian violence can be - in particular, how the violence oppresses women. As well as universally condemning this extreme gendered violence, negative social norms and degradation of women, the poems highlight the patriarchal history of rape and public demonstrations of female suffering that have occurred while some men have ‘stood dumb’ and unfeeling to the subjugation they have helped to perpetuate. 

Grade = 100%.  Feedback:

Wow Lucy!! You wrote such a compelling close analysis of the three poems. Your focus analysis of 'Limbo' and the interpretation of the complicit narrator was brilliant. Your expression has improved so much and you used a range of upper register academic vocabulary that you have gleaned from consistent whiteboard notation. You have also improved your modality and are now consistently writing objective close analysis of the language to interpret the implied views, values and contexts of the poet. So wonderful to see such improvements at year's end. This is a testament to all of the hard work you did on the class tasks with attention to feedback and notes. 

Truly brilliant work Lucy!

Stephen Milligan