III

There is repetition of ‘live skulls, blind eyed’ at the start of this section to link back to the second, but the link is now that these are ‘balanced on wild higgledy skeletons’, real people who lived in 1845, when a huge potato famine hit Ireland, killing a vast number of people.

The skeletons almost seem unreal, not human, as they have all the life taken from them as they ‘scoured the land’ looking for food, eating the ‘blighted’ (diseased) potatoes and dying, as a result of this.

The ‘new potato’ is described as if it seems fine, ‘sound as a stone’ but underneath this it is ‘putrefied’ (rotting).

‘millions rotted with it’ could be a reference to other potatoes or the people who died, lying in the pit of the earth, ironically where the diseased potatoes came from originally.

The people are described in stanza three as desperate and lifeless ‘eyes died hard’, showing a lifelessness in people’s eyes and ‘faces chilled to a plucked bird’ using a metaphor to make human faces seem pale and withered, as a bird looks when plucked of all its feathers.

There is a further metaphor ‘beaks of famine snipped at guts’ continuing the bird image, where the hunger pains are so bad in people’s stomachs that they feel like a bird pecking away there.

 The next stanza makes the earth personified, but this time as a ‘bitch’ not a mother, thus making her seem evil and unpleasant.

The people seem like birds ‘grubbing’ at the earth for food, which they cannot find. The idea in the simile ‘hope rotted like a marrow’ shows how the people lost all hope of survival, as the land and all it contained rotted away.

The final stanza adds further to the idea of decay with ‘stinking potatoes fouled the lands’ and the unpleasant alliteration ‘pits turned pus into filthy mounds’ with the ‘p’ sound sounding angry and disgusting, like the decay.

The idea of disease and wounds is continued with ‘you still smell the running sore’ making the earth like a person who is injured and the wound is rotted and decayed.