Fergana state university

Sacrifice

Sometimes at pagan shrines they vowed
offerings to idols . . . (Heaney B 8)
Like revenge, sacrifice permeates the selected poems as both event and theme, often evoking an appalled emotional response from readers. Sacrifice can be involuntary or voluntary and may or may not result in death. The OED definition gives primacy to the meaning: “slaughter of a person or animal as an offering for a particular purpose”, and conjures up graphic images of bloody killings. The sacrificial victim is selected by the group and is not a volunteer. A further definition: “the giving up of one thing for another higher or more urgent thing, thus entailing a loss”, refers to the voluntary form of sacrifice. The motives for each kind of sacrifice – love, the will to power, expediency and hate – endure to the present. While individuals may no longer be sacrificed to ensure a fruitful harvest, readers of Heaney’s and Hughes’ poems can find thematic parallels between the poems’ ancient worlds and late twentieth-century reality. The poetic language chosen by Heaney and Hughes emphasises the continuity of sacrificial acts from ancient times, while contemporary idiom and explicit language expose the ugliness and horror that can attend sacrifice in times of conflict and tensions, ancient and modern. However the second definition of sacrifice affirms that not all sacrifices are atrocities. Colloquial language in Hughes’ poetic version of Alcestis stresses the ideal of a sacrifice motivated by love, an enduring motive, engendering hope. The following examination of passages selected from Hughes’ Alcestis, The Oresteia, and Tales from Ovid and from Heaney’s Beowulf and “Mycenae Lookout”, confirms the continuing significance of the theme of sacrifice.


Voluntary Sacrifice

In Alcestis Hughes links ancient and modern acts of voluntary sacrifice by stressing marital love as a motive. Modern readers are familiar with such sacrifices, seen when rescuers willingly risk, and often sacrifice their lives to retrieve other people from danger. Live donor transplants of tissues, cells or organs allow the recipients to live. Hughes transposes this sacrifice to ancient times through a heart transplant analogy, when Apollo reveals that his appeal to Admetos’ parents to die in his place has failed:

I was asking for more than a kindness.
I was asking for their heart – so to speak –
To be cut out of their chest, and stitched into his. (Hughes A 3) The simple, clear and concise language supports the notion of enduring love as a powerful motive in voluntary sacrifice.
Alcestis’ motive is stated in similar plain language: “No woman ever loved a man / As she has loved Admetos” (Hughes A 11).
A woman is dying in this house.
She is giving up her life
So that her husband can live.
And this is the day of her death. (Hughes A 1) The direct and specific syntax, concluding with the monosyllabic chant: “this is the day of her death” (A 1), renounces distractions as it focuses attention on the magnitude of Alcestis’ decision. In the same way plainsong allows singers to concentrate on the

miracle of God’s love, and Hughes theorises such a connection when he writes that : “Those Greek plays were close to liturgy” (WP 246). In essays, critical reviews and interviews he expounds the relationship between verse and musical patterns. His interest explains the use of incantatory rhythms in the passage quoted, which is also connected to what he calls a utility style – “a colloquial prose readiness” which reflects a “poetic breadth, a ritual intensity and music” (WP 215). Meanwhile consonance, repetitions and contraries, “life, live, dying, death”, reinforce the conflict inherent in sacrifice.
Similar poetic techniques are present in the following passage, as sacrificial options are explored, conflicts identified, and the fallibility of love exposed again for a modern readership:
You hear men and women swear
They love somebody more than themselves. They are easy words.
The act is hard. Proof of the oath is hard. (Hughes A 11) Admetos, “a remarkable man” was “doomed to die young” (2). While “faceless Fate, [would] accept a substitute”, no person kindred to Admetos was willing to die in his place (3). His parents, “Two walking cadavers – / Both refused. Their voices rose to a screech” (3). The thunder of “doomed” (2) echoes in the verse with the consonance, while “cadavers” and “screech” jolt the senses and crash into the otherwise easy flowing tone. Parental love fails the “hard act”: “the scrap of time left to them / Is more precious to them than you are” (20). However by volunteering to die in her husband’s place, Alcestis demonstrates a marital love that does not fail the “hard act”. The inner conflict inherent in sacrifice nevertheless operates across the centuries as an unchanging human
dilemma. The conflict which Alcestis must first confront is imaged through simile and metaphor as she fights her own will to live.
She prepares carefully for her death and is “so calm” as she bathes, dresses in magnificent garments and jewels, and prays at each altar (12). However she is eventually overwhelmed: “in her room she broke down” (12), finding that her sacrifice, her intended act, is “hard” to endure. Her sacrifice is voluntary but her will to live is strong. “Her scream was gagged with sobs. . . . clawing at the coverlet . . . She was like a fly / Caught in a spider’s single strand” (12-3). Alliteration and contrapuntal language
– “calm” followed by the violence of “gagged” and “clawing” – dramatise the inevitable outcome of the fly’s struggle in the unseen but ever-present web, as an analogy for humanity’s eternal struggle against death. Violent imagery has replaced plainsong as the vehicle for the sacrificial decision. Short sharp sentences embody the brief time which is left:
She is already a dead weight. Her eyes are sunk in dark pits. Her blood hardly moving.
Her skin cold. She gasps for air.
And cries for light – more light. (Hughes A 14)