The Legacy of Semaus Heaney's North

Abstract

“What is history? What is love? What is justice? Sanity? Reason? Do the gods really exist, and does it matter?” Professor of law Yxta Maya Murray (2015, 137) certainly asks the grand questions in “Punishment and the Costs of Knowledge,” many of which will be recognized in Shakespeare’s drama, in French philosophy, and by people who appreciate the “good literature” that “summons powerful emotions” and that “disconcerts and puzzles,” as Martha Nussbaum does in Poetic Justice (1995, 5, 6). “Inevitably,” Murray continues, “we find that the lawyer and the artist come to antipodal conclusions, which then gives us occasion to ask: Who is right? The poet, or the judge?” She answers her own judicial scrutiny: “In my class we study ‘Punishment’” (2015, 137). Murray’s discerning questions develop emotionally and logically from Heaney’s poem “Punishment,” and from his controversial collection North (1975). The persona in “Punishment” hovers between compassion and cynicism, and holds up Diogenes’ lantern to himself as much as to others: we are all implicated.