How Heaney in his poem Punishment links the bog mummies of Denmark to the tarred and feather women of the Northern Ireland conflict.

                                     

Bog body poems - from Wikipedia 

Bog bodies inspire four poems in this volume: "Bog Queen", "The Grauballe Man", "Punishment", and "Strange Fruit". In his previous volume, Wintering Out, Heaney published the first of his bog-body poems, "Tollund Man". Heaney was inspired to write these poems after reading PV Glob's book, The Bog People, an archeological study of Iron-Age bodies discovered in the bogs of Northern Europe. In his essay "Feeling Into Words", Heaney explains that he found this book during a time when writing poetry had shifted for him "from being simply a matter of achieving the satisfactory verbal icon to being a search for images and symbols adequate to our predicament".^[3] 

The bog bodies of Glob's book became such symbols for Heaney, who writes, "And the unforgettable photographs of these victims blended in my mind with photographs of atrocities, past and present, in the long rites of Irish political and religious struggles".^[4] In these poems, Heaney draws connections between the past and present.