“DIGGING”—SEAMUS HEANEY
[ Lecture notes --Dr. S. Sreekumar]
Seamus Heaney was born in April of 1939 in Northern Ireland Belfast to study
English Language and Literature at the Queen’s University of Belfast
In 1966, Seamus Heaney published
his first collection of poems, called “Death of a Naturalist”, which deals with
the loss of childhood innocence and the following transitions into adulthood.
In this collection of poems, we are shown his admiration for his ancestors, his
own distorted view of nature and why he became a writer. The first poem of that
collection is “Digging”, which is the reconciliatory expression of an artist
who will not follow in his father and grandfather’s footsteps as a common labourer.
His other collections include Door into the Dark (1969), Wintering Out (1972), North (1979), Selected Poems 1965-1975 (1980), Station Island (1984), The Haw Lantern (1987), New Selected Poems 1966-1987 (1990) and Seeing Things (1991). In 1999 he published a new
translation of the Old English Epic Beowulf.
He won the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1995 "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which
exalt everyday miracles and the living past." Heaney taught at Harvard University
As Blake Morrison noted in his
work Seamus Heaney, the author is
"that rare thing, a poet rated highly by critics and academics yet popular
with 'the common reader.'" Part of Heaney's popularity stems from his
subject matter—modern Northern
Ireland , its farms and cities beset with
civil strife, its natural culture and language overrun by English rule. In The New York Review of Books, Richard
Murphy described Heaney as "the poet who has shown the finest art in
presenting a coherent vision of Ireland ,
past and present." Heaney's poetry is known for its aural beauty and
finely-wrought textures. Often described as a regional poet, he is also a
traditionalist who deliberately gestures back towards the “pre-modern” worlds
of William Wordsworth and John Clare.
Between my finger and
my thumb
The squat pen
rests; snug as a gun. thick, comfortable
Under my window, a
clean rasping sound grating,
rough
When the spade sinks
into gravelly ground:
My father digging. I
look down.
Heaney gives us an image of a
hand (specifically the fingers) holding a pen. But the focus is all on the pen.
The hand does not hold the pen; the pen rests in the hand. Then the speaker
throws a startling simile at us. In his hand, the pen feels like a gun. Both
pen and gun are tools, albeit for totally different jobs. We typically think of
writing as something peaceful and contemplative. Yet our speaker jolts us awake
by saying that writing is like holding a gun, which conjures up images of
violence and unrest.
It is the speaker's father who is
doing the digging. There have been three
different tools mentioned: the pen, the gun, and the spade. We see the speaker
(the son) indoors, pen in hand, and outside, the father works digging at the rocky
soil. Those are two very different activities.
Till his straining
rump among the flowerbeds hind
quarters
Bends low, comes up
twenty years away as
in a flashback
Stooping in rhythm
through potato drills
Where he was digging
The speaker watches from the
window as his father bends, digging among the flowerbeds. The father seems to
be working pretty hard. He is straining. The speaker imagines him twenty years
away, which we take to mean twenty years ago. But before we jump back in time,
take note of what his father is digging here: flowerbeds.
Twenty years ago his father was
digging potatoes. Potato drills are
evenly spaced rows of potatoes in a field. But it also refers to the act of
drilling into the earth to make a hole.
It seems the rhythm of the father bending and rising in his garden has
sparked this flashback – it's the same pattern he used to follow in the potato
drills, dipping down into the ground, and then coming back up. The son is
remembering the father twenty years ago. The son is grown up. The father has
grown old. Also, note the shift to the past tense here. Before this moment in
the poem, we've been working in the present tense, but this shift to the past
tells us we have entered a memory. Instead of flowerbeds, which are decorative,
his father was digging for potatoes, or food.
The coarse boot
nestled on the lug, the shaft rough
work boot—located—handle
Against the inside
knee was levered firmly. handled
He rooted out tall
tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new
potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool
hardness in our hands.
The coarse boot belongs to the
father, and it's probably coarse because it's a beat-up old work boot. A lug
refers to the top of the blade of the spade, which sticks out on either side of
the shaft, or handle. Stepping on the lug and putting all the weight on it
helps sink the tool into the ground. The speaker's father is still working on
the potato drill. "Rooted out" means he found the potato tops by
digging them up. The "bright edge" is the edge of the shovel's blade.
Up until this point, our speaker
was talking about his father as if he were alone, but "we" means that
the father and son are doing this work together. Or at the very least the son
is hanging around while the father works. The "cool hardness" refers
to the way the potato feels when it's pulled from the earth, almost like a
rock. Note, too, that again the speaker is talking about the way something
feels in his hand, only this time instead of a pen, it's a potato.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old
man.
The speakers father and
grandfather were very good diggers. The speaker seems to think the ability to
work with one's hands is a good thing; he is paying his father and grandfather
a compliment. "By God" is an exclamation (without the exclamation
point). It grabs our attention and shows us just how much enthusiasm and
admiration our speaker has for his father and grandfather's skill. Not only
does work seem important to our speaker, but tradition, too – or work as part
of the family tradition. He comes from a long line of diggers, and he seems
pretty proud. These lines are their own stanza. We take that to mean they are
pretty important.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day sod, grass
Than any other man on
Toner's bog. marshland
Once I carried him
milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily
with paper. He straightened up not
in a neat manner
To drink it, then
fell to right away
Nicking and
slicing neatly, heaving sods cutting,
scratching
Over his shoulder,
going down and down
For the good turf.
Digging. Nutrient
rich stuff good for using as fuel/fertilizer
The speaker remembers his
grandfather now, and he's probably quite young in this memory. The speaker
takes him fresh milk with paper shoved in the top as a stopper while his
grandfather works in the bog, and his grandfather takes a brief break from all
his hard work to have a sip. The subtle connection between the grandfather’s
work and the speaker’s profession (writing)—both use paper.
Heaney describes how he cuts into
the ground with his spade – "nicking and slicing neatly." It seems as
though it's not just hard labor, but takes a good amount of technique, too. The
grandfather's technique and efficiency are similar to what we saw from the
father earlier in the poem. This line is enjambed— that means that there's no
break between the two lines: it's all one, continuous phrase, separated only by
a line break. We see the grandfather continuing to toil away in Toner's bog,
chucking the turf over his shoulder as he goes. Both the father and the
grandfather seem to be pretty hard-working, tough men, and these lines continue
to emphasize that fact.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap mold or soil—mud squelched--sound
Of soggy peat,
the curt cuts of an edge wet soil—blunt
Through living roots
awaken in my head
But I've no spade to
follow men like them.
Between my finger and
my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.
The poet brings up the smell of potato mold, the sounds of the peat bog, and the cuts of the spade as it digs down into the earth. it is cold smell. The speaker is making use of sight, smell, sound, and touch imagery to give us a sense of how this memory makes him feel. We can just hear the "squelch" of the peat and the "curt cuts" into the ground.
Of course he's talking literally
about the roots of a plant – flowers, potatoes, etc. But you could also
definitely read "roots" to mean the roots the speaker has to his
father and grandfather's work – as in origins, or heredity, or tradition. They
are "living roots" because the memories are alive in him, our
speaker, as he watches his father in the flower bed. Up until now, we've been
reading about the father and the grandfather and all their tireless digging.
But here, we turn in a different direction. Based on how much he admires his
father and grandfather, it would be easy for us to assume that the speaker
would follow in their footsteps and become a digger, too. But alas, that's not
to be.
The speaker, we learn is not like
his father or his grandfather because he does not have the proper tool for
digging. It's all in the tools, it turns out. So without a spade, our speaker
is not a potato farmer or a peat harvester. He's something different entirely. While
at first we thought our speaker was a part of his family's tradition, we're now
seeing him as a bit of a black sheep, or outsider. But we're still not sure
why.
The poem ends like a boomerang;
the speaker circles all the way back to where he started and repeat the first
two lines of the poem. In doing so, he manages to show he is following in the
tradition of his father and grandfather. He's just using a different tool and a
different method. While his dad and grandpa dug with spades, our speaker plans
to dig with his pen. And just as his father and grandfather dig down into the
earth, perhaps the speaker wants to dig down into his past, his roots, to give
proper recognition to awesome men like his elders. The last lines of the poem
show how the speaker carries on the tradition of work and "digging"
in his own work, different as it may be.
Heaney creates a vivid picture of the potato fields making good use of all five senses, then gently returns us to the present: our speaker at his desk, ready to begin his writing. Or should we say digging?
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