➥ DIGGING – HEANEY
About the Author
Seamus Heaney was born to a Catholic family on April 13, 1939, the eldest of nine children, on his family’s ancestral farm in County Derry, Northern Ireland. His poetry was greatly influenced by the landscape and traditions of this region, as well as by the religious strife developing between Catholics and Protestants in nearby Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland. The landscape of rural County Derry is the setting and inspiration for much of his poetry. At age 12 Heaney received a scholarship to study at St. Columb’s College in Derry, where he learned Latin and Irish. He went on to study Anglo-Saxon at Queen’s University in Belfast. He earned a degree in English language and literature from Queen’s in 1961. He then attended St. Joseph’s Training College, also in Belfast. During this time he became inspired to write poetry, greatly influenced by the work of two contemporaries, English poet Ted Hughes (1930–98) and Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh (1904–67). In 2006 Heaney suffered a stroke. His last poetry collection, Human Chain, published in 2010, drew partly on the experiences of his illness. He died in Dublin on August 30, 2013.
Summary of the Text
“Digging,” the first poem in Seamus Heaney’s first book, says what he wants to do as a poet. At the start of the poem, the speaker looks at himself with his pen on the paper while listening to the sound of his dad digging outside the window. The speaker looks down, both at and away from his father, and talks about a slip in time. His father stays where he is, but the poem goes twenty years back in time, showing how long his father worked as a farmer. When the speaker talks about how his father’s movement never stops, the time changes from the present to the past.
The speaker then talks about his father’s tools, saying, “The rough boot cuddled up on the lug, and the shaft was firmly pressed against the inside knee.” These lines, which talk about how his dad’s shovel fits against his boot and leg, sound like the first lines of the poem, which talk about how the speaker’s fingers are on his pen. The speaker then talks about picking the potatoes using the pronoun “we,” which suggests that other people are in the memory. This could be Heaney’s brothers or his family in general. The tone is proud of the work and the potatoes.
The verse then goes back to being a pair of lines: “By God, the old man could handle a spade./Just like his old man.” These lines of the poem sound less formal than the ones that came before them. They sound more like something someone would say out loud to someone else. With an oath (“By God”), the speaker swears to tell the story, highlighting his personal link to rural Ireland.
In the next few lines of the song, the speaker talks about how his grandfather was a strong miner who dug for fuel. As a child, he remembers going up to his grandfather with a bottle of milk. His grandpa drank the milk and went back to work with even more energy. For the speaker, this moment still jumps out as an example of how hard his grandfather worked and how skilled he was. This writing is very clear, and the flow and words (like “nicking and slicing” and “going down and down”) make it sound like someone is digging.
The next line continues to use vivid language and lots of rhythm. People who grew up in the country say things like, “The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge/Through living roots awaken in my head.” At the end of the line, he says, “I have no spade to follow men like my father and grandfather.”
The last line, on the other hand, refers back to the pen from the first line, but this time the speaker is holding a pen instead of a spade. In the last line of the poem, “I’ll dig with it,”the speaker makes a promise to his family that he will do what they do, but in his own way.
Critical Analysis
The first couplet of “Digging” starts with a line and iambic pentameter. The trochee in “snug as,” on the other hand, breaks up the iambic pentameter, and the next line doesn’t follow the couplet form like the first one does. These three lines, though, all rhyme; Heaney rhymes “sound,” “ground,” and “down.” It looks like the simple, one-syllable rhymes in this and the previous stanzas set the stage for the rest of the poem, but Heaney stops using them in the middle of the poem, as if they had done their job. This choice is important because the poem is about the complicated feelings that come up when you break with custom.
The speaker starts the third stanza with the line, “I look down/Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds/Bends low, comes up twenty years away.” This marked the end of the second stanza. This line shows that the speaker’s father has always been digging, but now he’s digging in flowerbeds and in the past he was digging with potato drills. The reason for digging has changed, but the act of digging has not. The speaker changes to the past tense in the middle of a sentence to make the trip through time clear.
It’s clear that the next line has roots in the past. The first line talks about how the speaker’s father’s body interacts with the spade. However, the speaker’s voice separates the body from the father and sees it as an extension of the shovel. “The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft/Against the inside knee was levered firmly,” the person says. The speaker shows how deeply his father loves digging by calling his father’s boot and knee “the coarse boot” and “the inside knee,” respectively, instead of directly relating them to his father. While the speaker is talking about how his job as a writer is similar to his father’s job as a farmer, we can be pretty sure that the speaker is thinking about how important his job is to him.
There are more people in this third stanza, but they are not named. “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 speaker never says who the other people are in the first-person plural, but the sad tone of the sentence makes it sound like “we” are the speaker and his brothers. It sounds like the speaker is nostalgic and childlike when he talks about how amazing it is to touch the potatoes. It’s clear that the speaker has a deep personal link to farming that comes from his own experiences, not just those of his father and grandfather.
The next line of poetry goes back to the couplet structure of the first line, but not to the rhymes. The first thing the person says is “By God,” which is much more casual than the first few stanzas. This expression comes out of the speaker easily, which suggests that he is truly impressed by how skilled his father and grandfather are.
The speaker makes it clear that he is talking about more than just the difference between his job and his father’s by mentioning his grandfather. It seems like he’s enjoying the way of life that his father and grandpa shared. The nostalgia in this poem makes it sound like the speaker doesn’t have a clear opinion about his job as a writer.
It works to describe the speaker’s grandfather, even though it’s longer than the ones that came before it. “more turf in a day/Than any other man on Toner’s bog,” says the speaker about his grandfather. The speaker is very clear about how he sees his grandfather, but the tone of his statement is a little childlike, which suggests that the speaker still loves his father and grandfather like a child. For fuel, the speaker’s grandfather dug for grass, and the speaker’s father dug for potatoes. After that, the speaker talks about a time when he brought his grandpa “milk in a bottle/Corked sloppily with paper.” This picture makes the speaker think of the rural area where they grew up.
“He stood up straight to drink it, then fell right away, nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods over his shoulder, going down and down for the good turf.” These are the last words of the stanza. Looking for. A lot of the lines in this poem have a smooth, regular flow that makes me think of digging.
This line also brings back rhyme in a subtle way. “To drink it, then fell to right away/Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods” and “My grandfather cut more turf in a day/Than any other man on Toner’s bog” rhyme, but there are other lines that don’t rhyme between and around them. It is not fully clear why the speaker goes back to rhyme, but the return reminds the reader that the speaker is a poet. The speaker makes the action seem like a myth by putting the word “Digging” in its own line. He can’t seem to get to digging, so he kind of imagines what it would be like to do it. But he seems to think that if he works hard enough, he can reach the same spiritual place that his ancestors did.
When I think about the next line, which is the second-to-last line of the poem, I can smell the cold mold on potatoes, hear the squelch and slap of wet peat, and see the sharp cuts of an edge through live roots. The speaker uses a lot of rhyming to describe the sounds and smells that make him think of digging. He then goes through those feelings and, almost at the end, brings the reader back to the present tense, just like the feelings bring the speaker back to the past. “But I don’t have a spade to follow men like them,” he says.
This could be a sign of a discouraging direction, but the speaker doesn’t stop to think about the pros and cons of writing as a skill versus digging. He seems to think that they are exactly the same. Those “living roots” could be a metaphor for the speaker’s family, who are his “livingroots.” Naturally, he talks about them in terms of how they are cut through. This seems to be a reference to the speaker’s decision to leave farming as a job.
The last line of the poem starts with the exact same words as the first: “Between my finger and mythumb/The squat pen rests.” He doesn’t compare the pen to a gun this time, though. He just says, “I’ll dig with it.” He says he will dig with his own tools, his pen. This is an important part of the picture because it shows that his point is not that digging is meaningful when it is like writing, but that writing is meaningful when it is like digging. For the speaker, both acts are holy.
Comments
Post a Comment