Digging

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Digging

Seamus Heaney 1964

Written in the summer of 1964, “Digging” is the first poem of Seamus Heaney’s debut collection, Death of a Naturalist. In it, the speaker tries to reconcile his poetic vocation with the Irish, rural tradition from which he comes, a tradition embodied initially by the poet’s father, who is heard digging outside the window as the poet writes. The sight of his father stooped over his spade triggers in the poet childhood memories of his father digging potatoes and his grandfather cutting peat. The poet describes both activities with great care and admiration, focusing not only on the earthy smells, sounds, and rhythms of digging, but also on the refined technique with which both men practiced their occupation. “By God,” the poet reflects, “the old man could handle a spade. / Just like his old man.”

In a romantic fashion, then, digging represents both an art form and a means of identification with his native people and land—his own “living roots.” And though he feels briefly alienated from his forebears’ tradition (“I’ve not spade to follow men like them”), he quickly realizes that poetry itself is a form of digging, of “going down and down” into memory to express the experience of his father and grandfather. Thus, while his poetic career is in one way an emancipation from the rustic Irish past— Heaney is, after all, writing in English, a language once foreign to rural Ireland—it is also a way in which he, too, can help carry on his family’s tradition.

Author Biography

Heaney is generally regarded as one of Ireland’s preeminent poets of the late twentieth century. His verse frequently centers on the role poets play in society, with poems addressing issues of politics and culture, as well as inner-directed themes of self-discovery and spiritual growth. These topics are unified by Heaney’s Irish sensibilities and his interest in preserving his country’s history. Using language that ranges from, and often mixes, sexual metaphor and natural imagery, Heaney examines Irish life as it relates to the past and, also, as it ties into the larger context of human existence. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1995 for, as the Swedish Academy noted in its press release, “works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.”

Heaney was born in 1939 in Mossbawn, County Derry, Ireland. The eldest of nine children, he was raised as a Roman Catholic and grew up in the rural environment of his father’s farm. Upon receipt of a scholarship, he began studies at Saint Columb’s College in Northern Ireland and subsequently attended Queen’s University in Belfast. It was at Queen’s University that he became familiar with various forms of Irish, English, and American literature, most notably the work of poets such as Ted Hughes, Patrick Kavanagh, and Robert Frost. Like these poets, Heaney would draw upon childhood memories and past experience in his works. Using the pseudonym Incertus, Heaney began contributing poetry to university literary magazines. Upon graduating, he directed his energies toward both his writing and a career in education. He assumed a post at a secondary school and later served as a lecturer at Queen’s University. As a poet, he published his first collection, Death of a Naturalist, in 1966; the volume quickly established him as a writer of significance.

As Heaney’s stature increased, he was able to use his literary works to give voice to his social conscience. Of particular concern to him was the 1969 conflict between Catholic and Protestant factions over religion and national autonomy. Living in Belfast, the epicenter of the fighting, Heaney had a front-row seat for much of the ensuing violence, and his poetry of this period reflects his feelings on the causes and effects of the upheaval. Although he moved out of Belfast in 1972, his work continued to address themes directly relevant to the conflict. After a brief period in the early 1970s during which he wrote full-time, Heaney returned to teaching in 1975 as head of the English department at Caryfort College in Dublin. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, he divided his time between writing, teaching, and reading tours. His subsequent academic posts have included professor of poetry at Oxford University and Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University.

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

Poem Summary

Lines 1-2

The first stanza may be read as a rhymed couplet, or a pair of lines set in end rhyme. This is true even though the words “thumb” and “gun” are not exact rhymes as, for instance, “thumb” and “dumb” would be. Instead, they are an example of assonance, words whose vowel sounds agree but whose consonants do not. Heaney uses this technique often throughout the poem to stress certain words. Sometimes examples of assonance occur at the ends of lines, as here or in lines 4 and 5. At other times, they occur within lines. Two instances of internal assonance can be seen in line 2: “pen” and “rests,” and “snug and gun.”

The effect of setting these two lines together in such a way is important to the poem’s central concern: the poet’s isolation from his family’s way of life. Here, the speaker discusses the act of writing. The poem’s structure, however, sets this act apart from the subject he is writing about—the “digging” described in stanzas 2 through 7. Further, while writing poetry might normally seem to be a beautiful endeavor, here it is portrayed in clumsy terms. The pen is a blunt, “squat” tool and is described mechanically, resting “between [the speaker’s] finger and thumb.” In keeping with the speaker’s uncomfortable feeling about writing, there is a halting sound to the lines. This is created in line 2 by the string of stressed monosyllables (“squat pen rests”) as well as by the line’s caesura, or the strong grammatical pause represented by the semicolon. The caesura gives way to the most uncomfortable feature of the couplet, the comparison between the speaker’s pen and a gun. This simile suggests that the speaker feels poetry to be a forceful, even a violent, activity: an attempt to hammer subject into form and to derive poetic meaning from a world— in this case, the world of rural Ireland—in which things exist and relate to one another naturally.

Lines 3-9

In these lines, writing is contrasted with “digging” in two ways. First, while the poet’s occupation is described in its incipient state—the “pen rests”; it is like a “gun” that is aimed but has not yet been fired—the father’s digging is work in progress. In other words, the poet contrasts the inaction of writing with the action of digging. A certain amount of guilt arises from this contrast. The speaker’s father, though older, exerts himself as the poet does not: he “bends low”; he is “stooping,” his “straining rump among the flowerbeds.” The second contrast stems from the first. While writing is a silent activity, digging is portrayed mostly through aural sensations: the “clean rasping sound” as the “spade sinks into the gravelly ground.” Thus, the poet becomes aware of the essential division between himself and his father. This separation is represented by the window. While the digger’s job is physical, the poet’s task is observational. With perception, however, comes a certain amount of condescension: the poet looks, but he also “looks down.” In this way, the speaker suggests a progression from his father to himself: that as a poet rather than a digger, the speaker has risen to a level his father could not attain.

Lines 10-14

If the speaker feels a degree of superiority over his father, he also senses the abstractedness and the futility of the poet’s occupation in comparison with the digger’s. In the memories triggered in stanza 2 and described in stanza 3, digging is described as an activity requiring great precision, even artistry. The details the speaker remembers are as precise as the digger’s work: “nestled on the lug,” “against the inside knee,” “levered firmly,” the “bright, deep edge.” Through these we understand that the poet respects his father’s craft. Though it is “coarse,” it is also elegant. Further, its product is one that gives the kind of tactile satisfaction that a poem cannot. While a poem is merely a reflection of the natural world, potatoes are to be held and felt: The speaker recalls “loving their cool hardness in our hands.”

Lines 15-18

Memories of the speaker’s father lead to memories of his grandfather. Digging, then, is more than

Media Adaptations

Audio recordings of Heaney’s Stepping Stones, released in 1996, and The Spirit Level, released in 1997, are available on cassette by Penguin Audiobooks.
Audio recordings of Heaney’s poems, along with other resources, are available online at http://sunsite.unc.edu/dykki/poetry/heaney.
Seamus Heaney at Harvard, which includes Heaney reading his own poems as well as those of many other renowned poets, is available from Harvard Reading Room on two cassettes.
Poet’s Night: Eleven Leading Poets Celebrate Fifty Years of Poetry at Farrar, Straus, & Giroux includes readings by Heaney and other poets including Derek Walcott and Robert Pin-sky. It is available on cassette by Penguin Audiobooks.
Seamus Heaney, a video recording, features Heaney reading selected poems and speaking with interviewer Michael Silverblatt. The video was released in 1991 and is available from the Lannan Literary Videos series.
Seamus Heaney: Poet in Limboland / London Weekend Television, is a video recording that presents Heaney at work amidst the turmoil in his native Northern Ireland. Released in 1988, it is available from Films for the Humanities.

an occupation: it is a tradition passed over generations of the speaker’s family. While the father farmed potatoes, the grandfather cut turf, or peat— a dank, dense substance formed from vegetable matter and used as fuel. Turf is cut in brick-shaped slabs from bogs, and the speaker recalls a specific bog as the site of his grandfather’s heroic work. The reader, of course, is supposed to have no knowledge of “Toner’s bog” other than what the speaker reveals. It is an example of local lore, and by naming the bog and noting that his “grandfather cut more turf in one day” there than any other man, the speaker authenticates this parochial experience, elevating it to the level of myth. This attempt to find the mythic in the mundane is an important element in much of Heaney’s work.

Lines 19-24

The speaker’s recollections contrast his own childish ineptitude with his grandfather’s firmness and vigor. The bottle is “corked sloppily.” The grandfather “straightened up / Nicking and slicing neatly,” his attention focused on the work at hand. This work comes to life here and elsewhere in the poem through a number of poetic devices. One is onomatopoeia, or the verbal imitation of the sounds represented. Some examples of this are “sloppily,” “nicking and slicing,” “heaving,” and, in line 25, “squelch and slap.” Another device the poet employs is enjambment, a French term meaning “straddling.” This is when a description overruns the end of its line, enhancing its effect. In lines 22 and 23, the grandfather is described “heaving sods / Over his shoulder.” The line break interrupts the action of “heaving,” conveying the physical sense of a suspended moment when the sods are “over his shoulder.”

Lines 25-31

In the final lines, the poet realizes that by reflecting on his family’s tradition, the “living roots”—that is, the speaker’s own connection with his past—“awaken in [his] head.” This feeling is brought on not by intellectual contemplation but by the force of sounds and images: by the experience of digging, the “cold smell of potato mould,” the “soggy peat” and “curt cuts of an edge.” Though the speaker is not himself a actual digger like his father and grandfather, he knows that poetry is a kind of digging, a way of cutting through surfaces to find “the good turf.” Thus, the skill and technique that apply to digging could also be applied to poetry. The speaker reflects again on the “squat pen,” which is no longer a gun but a spade. “I’ll dig with it,” he resolves, and thus an identity continuous with that of his father and grandfather becomes clear.

Themes

Customs and Tradition

Referred to implicitly in “Digging” is the idea that young men are often expected to assume the same occupation as their fathers or “follow in his footsteps.” At the poem’s beginning, however, the speaker appears very removed from his father’s lifestyle, a concept that is reinforced by the stanza break between descriptions of the two. Heaney’s task, then, is to explain how he will carry on the tradition of digging maintained by his father and grandfather. To this end, he creates a metaphor that extends throughout the poem comparing the writing of poetry to digging and, furthermore, equating a digger’s tool—a spade—with the poet’s pen. The poem opens with an image of the poet’s hand, in which a “squat pen rests; snug as a gun.” The scene suggests the period of reflection prior to writing, and this idea is supported by the manifestation of his memories of his father and grandfather in the following stanzas. Heaney describes both men with reverence, portraying their movements as deliberate and efficient: of his father he exclaims, “By God, the old man could handle a spade,” and he regards his grandfather as a local legend who “cut more turf in a day / Than any other man on Toner’s bog.” But, for himself, the speaker has a less-admirable characterization; he is associated with the bottle of milk delivered to his working grandfather that is “corked sloppily with paper.” The unfavorable comparison entails sloppiness, the flimsiness of the paper, and the runny milk, which contrasts sharply with the efficiency and no-nonsense attitude of his grandfather, who “straightened up / To drink it. Then fell to right away.” Heaney realizes he does not measure up to his father and grandfather—whose strong physicalities he admires— when he writes, “But I’ve not spade to follow men like them.” His accomplishment is letting go of the guilt associated with leaving behind—and perhaps looking down upon—the manual labor that was “good enough” for his father. The speaker’s labor is mental—reflection—and, in this way, he unearths his connection to his relatives and his past. But in the last stanza, when Heaney writes of his pen, “I’ll dig with it,” he decides that he can indeed carry on the tradition of his fathers by writing poetry.

Search for Self

In an essay written ten years after “Digging,” Heaney stated that implicit in his poems are the notions of “poetry as revelation of the self to the self, ... poetry as a dig, a dig for finds that end up being plants.” Heaney’s “Digging” illustrates these ideas about the function of poetry with its central metaphors. For instance, the pen is related to the spade—a tool that brings things buried to the surface—, and the process of writing is compared to the act of digging. One occurrence of this metaphor lies in stanza 7, in which Heaney describes his grandfather’s digging as “Nicking and slicing neatly,” which through sound—the tight internal rhyme, along with the alliterative “n” and harsher consonants, “k” and “t”—and meaning connote exacting and precise methods. The writing of poetry is similarly accomplished because a successful poem is economical; a poet selects words that most effectively communicate the image, emotion, or idea the poet would like the reader to experience. Meanwhile, the poet rejects many imprecise words that would clutter the poem and obscure the thing the poet would like to express, thus the poet-digger is “slicing neatly” or “heaving sods / Over his shoulder, going down and down / for the good turf.” The “good turf” correlates to what Heaney referred to as the “finds that end up being plants.” They are true-to-life and genuine things worthy of being evoked in a poem. Heaney suggests that genuine experiences and emotions are often buried by “facts and surfaces,” or they are often eclipsed or hidden by everyday conventionalism and trivialities and they must be re-discovered through digging. Of “Digging,” itself, Heaney wrote that it “was the first place where I felt I had let down a shaft into real life.” This poem demonstrates how he sees “poetry as a dig”; in it Heaney draws upon personal memories to help him decide his career choice, or what will be his identity as an adult.

Memory and Reminiscence

Often the sight, smell, or sound of something familiar has the power to evoke memories. In “Digging,” when Heaney hears a “clean rasping sound” and sees his father working in the garden, it awakens memories, or takes him back to his childhood. This transition back in time is depicted by his father “bend[ing] low” and “com[ing] up twenty years away.” His father stoops “in rhythm through potato drills.” “Rhythm” and “drills” imply repetitiveness that Heaney saw this sight often when he was younger. Although his father’s life work was repetitive, and Heaney suggests that he scorned

Topics for Further Study

Write a poem comparing the act of writing a poem with a profession practiced by someone in your family. Give your poem a title that draws attention to the connection.
How does Heaney use this poem to tell you about what a writer does? Why does he compare his pen to a gun?

this—he looks down on his father from the window and describes him comically, “his straining rump among the flowerbeds”—he also remembers the appeal of it. He describes his working father and grandfather admiringly and they are portrayed as strong and adept. He admits to enjoying helping out by picking up the potatoes his father uncovered, remembering “loving their cool hardness in [his] hands.” These memories are vivid with sensations—“the cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap / of soggy peat”—and remind him of his family ties, or his “living roots.”

Style

Many of Heaney’s poems, including his early ones, are recognized for their conventional constructions, often demonstrating set stanza forms and rhyme schemes. For an example of this, the reader might consider “Follower,” another poem from Death of a Naturalist. In that poem, Heaney constructs a series of four-line stanzas in order to convey the symmetry and regularity of the father’s plowing. In “Digging,” however, the speaker’s main concern necessitates a different kind of structure. While the poem’s images describe the graceful and fine-honed technique of digging, it is the art of poetry that is called into question. Compare, for instance, the way the speaker compares the implement of the poet’s trade (“the squat pen ... snug as a gun”) with his grandfather’s orderly approach to cutting turf (“nicking and slicing neatly”). While digging seems to the speaker an organic form, adapted to the conditions of nature, poetry seems a man-made artifice, one external to the subject and requiring a kind of blunt force to push images together. Thus, we see an irregular pattern of line and stanza lengths that suggest the randomness of memory more than the diggers’ occupation. Rhymes occur inconsistently and often internally, conveying a groping sense of order. By the final stanza, however, the speaker has gained the confidence that poetry itself is a kind of digging and, we assume, that poetry’s art must come from natural experience rather than forced artifice. Thus, though the last words echo the poem’s first, a sense of greater order has been resolved. The gun has become a tool of digging, and a second line break shows that the technique of poetry must come from the rhythms of its subject.

Historical Context

At the time Heaney wrote “Digging” in 1964, he lived in Belfast, the largest city in Northern Ireland. Since its institution as a nation, Northern Ireland has endured violence caused by the conflicts between Unionists (who are generally Protestant and want Northern Ireland to remain a part of Great Britain) and Republicans (who are mostly Catholic and believe that there should be only one Ireland). In the early 1960s, though, there was a rising interest among Catholics to abandon the border dispute and focus, rather, on the closer-to-home issues concerning their civil rights. Their main focus was the disparity in the quality of life between Northern Ireland’s Protestant and Catholic communities due to discrimination by the Protestant majority against Catholics. Determined to resolve this situation without violence, the Catholic community began a civil rights movement modeled after the one led by African Americans in the United States. Activists and supporters of the movement made specific complaints about the inequality of treatment suffered by the Catholic population. This inequality had been institutionalized at the creation of the Northern Ireland state, although discrimination against Irish Catholics had existed for centuries before the partition.

The Roots of the Troubles in Northern Ireland

In 1912 when the British government introduced the Irish Home Rule Bill, which was to grant Ireland self-government, Irish Catholics and Protestants were already forming segregated communities. Although the introduction of the Home Rule Bill can be seen as the start of the violence and turmoil in twentieth-century Ireland, its introduction was the culmination of centuries of civil unrest caused by the approaches by which Britain had practiced its rule over Ireland. Since the 1200s Ireland had been under loose British rule, but in 1607 the British began to “plant” Protestant settlers from Scotland and England in order to spread Protestantism in Catholic Ireland’s northern regions during what was dubbed the Plantation of Ulster. Eventually, Ulster became a mostly Protestant and industrialized settlement, while predominantly agricultural Catholic communities resided in the rest of Ireland. Catholics, both in the Ulster and the southern regions of Ireland, became a subordinate class under Protestant British rule; they were subject to unfair laws, one of which prohibited them from owning the land upon which they lived. Subsequently, at the end of the nineteenth century tolerance about the unfair treatment dissipated. Irish nationalism began to grow and demands were made on the British government for Irish independence.

Although there were several unsuccessful uprisings against the British rule in Ireland, there was not a widespread rise in Irish nationalism until the early 1800s. The movement divided Ireland along lines of religious affiliations—Protestants, fearing “Rome Rule,” or Catholic dominance in government, preferred for Ireland to remain under British rule, while Catholics wanted independence. The British government at Westminster conceded to demands made by the nationalist Catholics and introduced the Irish Home Rule Bill. The Protestant community responded by building up a military force in retaliation, while the Catholic population countered with the formation of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Violent conflict ensued throughout the 1910s. In 1921, in an attempt to end the violence, the partition between northern and southern Ireland was established. Since the partition there has been bloodshed in both Irelands over the existence of the border. Terrorist groups and police forces on both sides of the conflict have raided arsenals, bombed buildings and transportation, and have killed many partisan military personnel as well as innocent civilians.

Civil Rights Campaigns

In 1962 the IRA announced the end of its six-year “border campaign,” which was a series of bombings and attacks on government and military institutions and assassinations of security-force personnel. The IRA campaign was unsuccessful; by the end of the campaign, many members were either dead or imprisoned, and their violent practices eroded much of the Catholic community’s support. The end of the IRA campaign was concurrent with the emergence of the civil rights movement which aimed to reform rather than rebel. The conflict over the border dissipated as groups such as the Campaign for Social Justice and the Campaign for Democracy in Ulster were formed, in 1964 and 1965, respectively. These groups successfully raised consciousness of and gave voice to the unfair treatment of the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland, and they later gave rise to an organization called the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) in 1967. With the birth of NICRA, the civil rights campaign went into the streets, as thousands of citizens became involved in marches and rallies, protesting a number of inequalities, including suspect electoral procedures and discrimination in public-housing allocation, against the Catholic community that had existed since the creation of Northern Ireland.

Another goal of NICRA was to see the abolition of a menacing and powerful police force called the B-Specials and the Special Powers Act, which gave military and police forces in Northern Ireland a wide range of power. The B-Specials force was formed in 1920 during a violent civil war—between British loyalists and Irish nationalists—that resulted in the partition of Ireland. The B-Specials gained notoriety for using undue force and for being blatantly sectarian. Although it was to represent Northern Ireland’s population proportionately, by 1969, there was not one Catholic among the nearly 9,000-member B-Specials. In addition, the group was backed by the Special Powers Act, which had also been established—allegedly for only one year—in the violent period of the early 1920s. The Act allowed security forces like the B-Specials a sweeping range of power; according to Northern Ireland: The Divided Province, edited by Keith Jeffery, police officers were allowed to arrest without a warrant “anyone ‘on suspicion of acting, having acted, or being able to act’ in a manner contrary to the peace.” The Special Powers Act also provided that police did not need warrants to search or seize property and that even without charge, those arrested could be interned indefinitely. Ironically, although NICRA and protesters called for its abolition, in 1968 the Special Powers Act was invoked to side-track a large march through the city of Londonderry and, several months later, club-wielding off-duty B-Specials who were among a Protestant mob that attacked protesting marchers.

Compare & Contrast

1964: After the rejection of more than 4,000 designs, a new design for the Canadian flag is chosen to replace the Canadian Red Ensign, a red flag featuring the British Union Jack and the Arms of Canada shield. The new composition is a red maple leaf centered over a white square which is over a red background.
1976: In the Canadian province of Quebéc, the provincial flag, a blue flag with a white cross, and four fleur-de-lis, symbolizes the French-Canadian nationalist movement. Quebécers vote the Parti Quebécois, a political party that wished to achieve Quebéc independence from Canada, into power.
1995: Québec citizens vote in a referendum on whether or not Quebéc can secede from Canada. The proposition is voted down by only a one-percent margin.
Today: The Canadian flag is banned from the Canada’s Parliament to end disruptions caused by its presence. Representatives of the Canadian Reform Party had waved Canadian flags and wore maple-leaf ties in Parliament to antagonize Quebécois members who complained that there were too many Canadian flags at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan.
1964: Nelson Mandela, an activist and leader of the movement against apartheid, segregation, and the repression of the black majority in South Africa, is sentenced to life in prison after being charged with sabotage and treason.
1973: The United Nations votes to ban and punish apartheid. Many countries later take economic sanctions against South Africa to punish the government’s repression of nonwhite citizens. The sanctions result in economic troubles for South Africa.
1990: Mandela is released from prison under the orders of F. W. DeKlerk, then president of South Africa. His release came after DeKlerk’s successful effort to ban apartheid.
Today: Since being elected in 1994, Mandela has served as president of South Africa, which now is ruled by a much more democratic government.
1964: In Yugoslavia communist rule under President Josip Broz Tito keeps relative peace by repressing expressions of nationalism among the country’s numerous ethnic groups.
1988: Yugoslav unity begins to fall apart as its economy declines. New President Slobodan Milosevic riles up nationalism among Serbs, one of Yugoslavia’s largest ethnic groups, and hatred between ethnic groups resurfaces.
Today: Wars between ethnic groups continue in Yugoslavia, most recently between Serbs and Albanian Kosovars. Many suspect Milosevic had planned to drive out the Albanian majority of the Kosovo region of Serbia. Leaders of the international community have repeatedly issued threats of military intervention to Milosevic, and they have been reluctant to let this course of action materialize.

NICRA had looked to the African-American Civil Rights movement on which to model their own and organized demonstrations, sit-ins, and petitions. As many as 4, 000 people would gather to march through Northern Ireland’s cities and towns, carrying picket signs and singing or cheering. The Protestant/Unionist responses to the demonstrations were greatly varied; while some Protestants believed in reform and agreed with the moderate demands of the Catholics, many others resisted it and refused to acknowledge any institutionalized discrimination against Catholics. In 1968, the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Terence O’Neill introduced legislation that was to meet some of the demands made by the campaigners, but heavy resistance of right-wing Unionists caused O’Neill to resign several months later before the follow-through of the legislation. The marches that were intended to be moderate expressions brought extreme backlash from Protestant mobs, and police forces assigned to control the crowds and riots broke out. Conversely counter-marches that were planned by Protestants were attacked by Catholic mobs. August of 1969 seemed to be the end civil rights movement as riots became out of control and mobs of armed Protestants attacked Catholic residential areas. Unable to control the situation, Northern Ireland’s government authorities agreed to the deployment of British Army troops to protect Catholic areas under attack. The presence of British troops did not, however, keep the peace for long, as the troops tended to side with the Unionists, and Catholics found increased resistance. In the 1970s the IRA re-emerged and, to call attention to their renewed demands for the withdrawal of British rule, they used terrorist practices for their cause. Presently there has not been a permanent cease-fire in Northern Ireland, but hopes for peace have risen after voters in Northern Ireland overwhelmingly approved a peace accord in May of 1998.

Critical Overview

In a 1974 essay, “Feelings into Words,” published in The Poet’s Work, Heaney himself offers an insightful assessment of “Digging”: “[It was] the first poem I wrote where I thought my feelings got into words, or, to put it more accurately, where I thought my feel had got into words. Its rhythms and noises still please me, although there are a couple of lines in it that have the theatricality of the gunslinger rather than the self-absorption of the digger.” Heaney’s seems an honest evaluation of the gun metaphor. Critic W. S. Di Piero agrees that the first stanza may reveal the poet’s insistence more than his subject: “It must be said that [Heaney’s] ambition, which is in almost every way admirable and pure, does on occasion lead him to will connections by virtue of overwrought metaphor.” Still, Di Piero argues, the overarching metaphor of the poem, that of digging, is successful. “Digging” becomes at once a signal of origins and legacies and a sounding of Heaney’s own poetic ambitions,” Di Piero writes. It represents, according to Di Piero, both the method by which the poet will work and his departure from family tradition: “Although the fancy may be somewhat strained and self-important, Heaney’s intention is clear enough: he wants connections, continuities, and historical justification for his art.” Irish screenwriter and critic Elmer Andrews takes a more esoteric view toward the poem. “Digging,” he writes, demonstrates Heaney’s occasional wish to break out of the “essentially passive role” of the poet; from the beginning of the poem, “the shadow of a gunman is present, as if to convince us that the pen can be as mighty as the gun. He compensates for his failure to follow men of action by making promises: he’ll dig with his pen, he says.”

Criticism

Carolyn Meyer

Carolyn Meyer holds a Ph.D. in Modern British and Irish Literature and has taught contemporary literature at several Canadian universities, including the University of Toronto. In the following essay, Meyer notes that “Digging” is a pastoral lyric that commemorates the commonplaces of Heaney’s rural childhood, yet, in blurring the distinction between digger and artist, Heaney finds the means to articulate his own artistic goals and to address his dual commitment to his craft and the traditions that are his by birth.

“Digging,” the opening poem of Seamus Heaney’s first collection, Death of a Naturalist, serves to introduce the Irish Nobel Laureate’s abiding preoccupation with poetic identity as well as his continuing endeavor to plumb the depths of soil and selfhood. Part ars poetica, part homage to a waning tradition of rural craftsmanship—a birthright the poet can claim only figuratively— “Digging” explores yet seeks to reconcile the gaps that exist between father and son, between past and present, between agricultural and cultural labor, and between the aspirations of the individual and the expectations of his first community. Yet, as Heaney remarks in his essay “Feeling into Words,” “Digging” also stands out as “the first poem where I thought my feelings had got into words, or to put it more accurately, where I thought my feel had got into words.” For Heaney, writing the poem in a way that would “define his own reality” was something of a breakthrough. As a signal of the poet’s coming of age, it is not simply an exercise in what Heaney calls “craft”—the things you can learn from other verse—, but an embodiment of what he terms poetic “technique”—“the whole creative effort of the mind’s and body’s resources to bring the meaning of experience within the jurisdiction of

What Do I Read Next?

Heaney was influenced by the poetry of Patrick Kavanaugh, who is considered to have given an authentic voice to the culture of rural Ireland. Kavanaugh’s long poem “The Great Hunger” impressed Heaney as one way to make effective poetry out of the sort of native Irish subject matter familiar to him. The poem is included in Kavanaugh’s Complete Poems.
Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978 is a collection of essays written by Heaney about his own works, his education, and his initiation into writing, as well his reflections on the works of other writers. Heaney discusses works by poets such as W. B. Yeats, Theodore Roethke, and Stevie Smith.
North is a collection of poems published in 1975, in which Heaney relates to some realities of the Troubles in his native Northern Ireland.
Heaney has cited the work of British poet Ted Hughes as one of his influences. Hughes’s 1960 collection, Lupercal, garnered wide acclaim.

form.” Though not wishing to overstate the importance of this poem, Heaney writes in his essay “Feeling Into Words”:

I now believe that the “Digging” poem had for me the force of an initiation ... I wrote it in the summer of 1964, almost two years after I had begun to “dabble in verses.” This was the first place where I felt I had done more than make an arrangement of words: I felt that I had let down a shaft into real life. That facts and surfaces of the thing were true, but more important, the excitement that came from naming them gave me a kind of insouciance and a kind of confidence. I didn’t care who thought what about it: somehow, it had surprised me by coming out with a stance and an idea that I would stand over.... As I say, I wrote it years ago; yet perhaps I should say that I dug it up, because I have come to realize that it was laid down in me years before that even.

In saying that he “dug up” the poem, Heaney exposes the multiple implications of its title. Digging, in this case, refers not only to the harsh yet exacting work of Heaney’s County Derry forebears, extracting potatoes and peat from the intractable terrain, but to the process of recollecting, delving into, and retrieving experience—of unearthing the past, the “living roots”—by which the poem itself is created. The activity of digging, then, becomes a metaphor for writing, just as it remains integral to Heaney’s view of “poetry as divination, poetry as revelation of the self to the self, as restoration of the culture to itself; poems as elements of continuity, with the aura and authenticity of archaeological finds, where the buried shard has an importance that is not diminished by the importance of the buried city; poetry as dig, a dig for finds that end up being plants.”

As much as “Digging” is about the gradual displacement of rural life, about a young writer’s experience of being torn between the lessons of his upbringing and the dictates of his formal education, it is also a postmodernist poem about writing poetry and about the forging of poetic identity. In the family tradition of rural craftsmanship that Heaney admires and honors, he ultimately discovers an appropriate model and precedent for the comparable literary craftsmanship to which he dedicates himself. To this end, Heaney makes what he calls “the simple heart of the matter”: an analogy between the pen and the spade—tools of very different trades but identical function, both bringing to the surface the treasures that lie buried,” as he noted in his essay “Feeling into Words.” “Digging” celebrates creativity by making a vital connection between what can be derived from the soil and what can be drawn from the fertile ground of memory and imagination.

Calm and factual in its assertions, the poem, according to critic Elmer Andrews in The Poetry of Seamus Heaney, “attempts a direct transcription of particular moments dug out of memory.” Those moments, in themselves, are simple enough but give rise to a welter of emotions: from beneath his window where he sits and writes, the poet hears the sound of his father digging. As he looks down to watch, the sight brings back proud and vivid childhood memories, first of his father digging up potatoes and then of his grandfather cutting peat. Yet because the poet has opted to live by the pen and not the spade (as improved educational opportunities for Ulster Catholics enabled Heaney to do), those time-honored skills are soon to be regretfully forsaken, though not forgotten. Conscious of the impending loss, but just as determined to reverse it, the poet, in the end, manages to claim kinship with his forefathers and remain faithful to the land they tilled by resolving, with the unshakable force of a manifesto, to dig on—not with a spade but a pen.

Heaney once referred to “Digging” (in “Feeling into Words”) as “a big coarse-grained navvy of a poem.” What, in part, accounts for its sturdiness is the way its auditory effects heighten the impact of its descriptions. Like the physicality, power, and precision of the diggers, Heaney’s heavily stressed monosyllables bristle with a robust, almost muscular energy. Their “curtness” and economy evoke the taciturnity of a country people whose actions speak louder than words. The demanding harshness of a life spent working the land is equally registered in the poem’s strong auditory appeal—in the vigor of its verbs, the dissonances of its slant rhymes, and its sporadic outcroppings of hard, sometimes guttural consonants. Altogether, Heaney’s management of phonic echo—alliteration, assonance, consonance, internal rhyme, not to mention mis-rhyme—gives the poem a sonic richness that enhances and reinforces its conceptual content. His liking for free verse, seen here in the infrequent rhymes and irregular line and stanza lengths, helps in this case to reproduce the gapped and episodic workings of memory, to provide a visual metaphor for the speaker’s independent course in life and to reflect the discontinuities which that freedom brings about. Often it is through the silent pressure of the white spaces between stanzas that the advances in consciousness and understanding take place. Heaney critic and fellow Ulsterman John Wilson Foster, writing in his essay “The Poetry of Seamus Heaney,” has even suggested that the poem’s “chopped lines and caesurae imitate turf-cutting.”

Many of Heaney’s early poems are about the use of tools and “Digging” is no exception, owing its origins to the familiar adages “the pen’s lighter than the spade” and “learning’s easy carried” which taunted him as a schoolboy, according to the poet in “Feeling into Words.” The opening stanza finds the poet, pen in hand, in the act of composition, but the burden of his work is by implication anything but light or effortless. Though the pen “rests” snugly between his thumb and finger, its squatness is more akin to the thick round shaft of a Ulster spade than to the elegance of a writing implement. As analogy follows analogy, the pen acquires not only the unwieldiness of a farm tool but the menace of a weapon—“snug as a gun.” The combined shock value and macho appeal of this simile has prompted Heaney to comment that “Digging” has to it the “theatricality of the gunslinger.” However, it is not alone among the poems of Death of a Naturalist

“That restorative return to origins, aided by the poem’s retrospective impulse, helps to make ‘Digging’ singularly important within Heaney’s poetic canon, marking a crucial stage in his development as a writer where he learned to trust his own background ...”

in presenting images of violence or detonation (the “pottery bombs” of “Churning Day” being another example) and it is necessarily, by means of indirect reference or subtext, that the threats posed to the Ulster Catholic minority, even before the return of the Troubles in the late 1960s, are made abundantly clear. Cautioning him against outspokenness, Heaney’s mother once told him, “whatever you say, say nothing,” and for Northern Irish writers as a whole, the effort to confront the barbarities of sectarianism without a disguising metaphorical framework or mode of displacement—that is, to address them directly—has been a relatively recent phenomenon. Beyond the swaggering staginess and political overtones of Heaney’s latently violent images, the pen-as-gun is more specifically a symbol of the empowerment to be achieved through writing and, as figurative phallus, of the male power he associates with his father and with which he seeks kinship. The insistent assonantal repetitions of “thumb,” “snug,” and “gun” further contribute to the forcefulness of this compact opening metaphor.

Sound and subject are equally allied in the next stanza, where the euphonic effect of end rhyme (“sound ... ground”) and alliterative triple meters (“gravelly ground”) satisfies the ear in a way that hints at the satisfactions to be derived from the work itself. The poem’s only rhyming couplet, with its emphatic terminal punctuation, lends climactic importance to the poet’s identification of the sounds’ origins—“My father, digging.” The activity being named likewise gains an immediacy from the participle ending as well as from the simplicity of the statement itself. In looking down to where his father digs, however, the poet reveals a detachment that is not merely spatial but psychological. The distance between the son and his father, between interior and exterior, between observer and observed, between one way of life and another is emphasized by the white space between stanzas that interrupts the syntactic unit: “I look down // Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds / Bends low.” Given the undignified, endearingly comical depiction of the father, who past his prime is reduced to no more than a “straining rump,” “I look down” strikes a similar note of condescension at the apparent lowliness of manual labor. For a time, it seems, the customary subservience and hero-worship of the parent-child relationship is reversed, much as it is at the end of “Follower,” but in this case the natural dynamic of father and son is quickly restored. The poet subsequently recalls how, as a child, he dutifully gathered the potatoes his father cultivated and offered up a bottle of milk to his toiling grandfather who likewise assumed heroic status in his boyish imagination.

Even the somewhat humbling sight of his father struggling with tasks he once performed with ease is enough to trigger the recollection of another scene twenty years earlier—a scene that unfolds with a slow descriptive exactness which imbues the workaday skill with the aspect of ritual. Like a close-up shot from ground-level up, the view is one that lingers to capture the sensuous melding of digger and spade: “The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft / Against the inside knee was levered firmly.” The memory of such expertise is enough to elicit a heartfelt expression of filial pride: “By God, the old man could handle a spade. / Just like his old man.” The friendly colloquialism “old man,” when repeated, comes to signify the idea of permanence fostered by succession within the male line. As the memory of one man merges with that of another, the father, who, according to critic David Lloyd in “‘Pap for the Dispossessed’ [Heaney and the Postcolonial Moment],” “stands initially for the writer’s exclusion from identity with the land and past... by way of his own father slides across into the position of a figure for continuity.”

In the boastful assertion “My grandfather cut more turf in a day / Than any other man on Toner’s bog,” Heaney not only sounds a note of one-upmanship or familial pride but expresses a profound sense of place or personal geography, a trust in the local and in the sense of identity it provides. Contributing to the detailed evocation of place that follows are phrases such as “the squelch and slap / Of soggy peat” that alliterate the harshness of the terrain at the same time as they rely on onomatopoeic effect to bring that landscape to life. The exacting nature of the work, as Elmer Andrews observes in The Poetry of Seamus Heaney, is captured in a corresponding precision of diction, particularly in the short vowels of “nicking and slicing” and in the clipped monosyllables of “curt cuts.” An equal sense of its strenuousness emerges through the abundance of hard consonants—the “d” and “g” sounds of “going down and down / For the good turf”—and through the long-vowelled sounds of “neatly, heaving.” Even the natural pauses in the digging rhythm are reproduced in the broken syntax of run-on lines such as “heaving sods / Over his shoulder,” where stressed syllables give way to unstressed ones as the motion is carried through to completion. The simple one-word sentence—“Digging”—supplies a kind of coda to the stanza, formalizing the activity and, in the process, creating an inescapable sense of distance from it. That distance proves troubling for the poet. On the one hand, he recognizes how the familiar rhythms of those country ways continue to govern his life and nurture his creativity, but on the other hand, he is faced with the sobering fact of his own dispossession and the extent to which that traditional way of life is no longer accessible to him: “... the curt cuts of an edge / Through living roots awaken in my head. / But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.” “Digging” is the first of many poems centered on the tension between two contradictory commands: to be faithful to the collective experience of family and community or to be true to the recognitions of the emerging self. His dilemma is one of commitment—whether to depart from his heritage or conform.

At a point where the breeching of tradition seems inevitable and old skills are destined to give way to the new, the aesthetic resolution of the final stanza neatly reconciles the poet’s craft with the hereditary claims upon him. The guilt he harbors about failing to carry on a family tradition is put to rest with his symbolic appropriation of the spade and metaphorical continuation of his forefathers’ work. Not merely consolatory or compensatory, his resolution to “dig” with his pen represents a conscious and willed striving for continuity. Moreover, in making that pen simply “squat” and not menacing like a gun, Heaney seems to have found within the diggers’ example and legacy the kind of strength and deftness he wants his writing to have. The partial repetition of the opening lines gives the poem a circularity that reinforces the idea of continuity: the poem comes back to the point from which it began, it returns to origins. That restorative return to origins, aided by the poem’s retrospective impulse, helps to make “Digging” singularly important within Heaney’s poetic canon, marking a crucial stage in his development as a writer where he learned to trust his own background and “let down a shaft into reality.” Ultimately, by making artists of the diggers and a digger of the artist, Heaney minimizes both the corrosive effects of change and the gulf that had existed between agricultural and cultural livelihoods. Reconciliation is achieved, in the best tradition of his family, with a skillful sleight of hand.

Source: Carolyn Meyer, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1999.

Tyrus Miller

Tyrus Miller is an assistant professor at Yale University, where he teaches twentieth-century literature and visual arts. In the following essay, Miller presents Heaney’s struggle to favorably compare writing poetry with age-old rural labor.

Seamus Heaney’s “Digging,” from his first book, Death of a Naturalist, seeks to justify his choice of vocation as a poet and sets out the principles by which he will pursue his chosen trade. It presents the poet working at his writing desk and moves through successively deeper levels of memory before returning to the present tense, in which his poem is taking shape. Through this imaginary trip back in time while writing, Heaney meditates on the nature of tradition, the changes that have occurred between previous generations of Irishmen and his own, and the analogies between poetry and other forms of labor characteristic of the Northern Ireland society in which he grew up and came into manhood. Heaney’s own poetry, this poem suggests, can become a new link in the seemingly broken chain of tradition that might connect the rural labor of the grandfather and father with the more intellectual and reflective work of the writer. At the same time, poetic meditation, of the sort dramatized by the poem, is self-reflexively shown to be the very instrument by which the poet unearths his connection to the past, “digging” back into his memory in order to connect with his farming ancestors.

Much of emotional impact of “Digging” comes from Heaney’s ability to keep in play two opposed feelings of time simultaneously. On the one hand, he registers the irreversible passage of time, in which he has grown up from the boy who once worked alongside his father and grandfather into the man presently writing at his desk. His grandfather, presumably, is long dead; his father, too, is older, perhaps now retired, for we see him now straining among flowerbeds instead of performing hard work like “scattering new potatoes.” We sense as readers a kind of melancholy feeling of aging and decline, also subtly evoked by the reversal of the relative physical positions of father and son. If once the son literally looked up to the father as he worked by his side, the son now is working apart from and poised above his father. Equally, however, Heaney also suggests that the lapse of time between then and now might be reversed or canceled through poetic “digging,” which tries to bring memory to life again and reconnect past and present. Neither time definitively wins out in the poem, and it is precisely that lack of resolution that sets the task for the poet: he must poetically dig against time, single-mindedly going at it again and again, just as his grandfather once did in cutting “more turf in a day / Than any other man on Toner’s bog.”

Heaney begins his poem with a tight focus on the instrument of writing and the hand that grips it. Yet the image of the writing hand is unexpectedly heavy, thick, and muscular, seemingly more appropriate to a farmer or gamekeeper than to a poet or scholar: “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.” The pen lies “squat” and “snug” in the hand, words which connote tension and compression within the powerful grasp in which the writer’s tool lies. The simile of the pen to a “gun,” an instrument otherwise outside of the basic agricultural imagery of the poem, also picks up this sense of coiled power: the pen, now at “rest,” holds within itself a reserve of force which could even prove explosive if released all at once. “Squat,” “snug,” and “gun” also anticipate an imitative sound-imagery, used throughout the poem, which is made explicit in the next stanza: “a clean rasping sound / When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: / My father, digging.” The repeated uses of hard sounds such as “sp,” “gr,” and “g” suggests the analogy between the manual labor of digging and turf-cutting in the Irish soil and the poet’s “digging” in medium of Northern Irish speech to turn up harsh, hard-edged sounds. The sound of words, as much as their meaning, will help the poet uncover a partly hidden pathway into the rural Irish past.

The first three stanzas are marked by a rapid shift of scenes within the mind and text of the poet at work. We start in stanza one in the poet’s room,

“The poet lends his father’s digging—the real physical labor of grubbing in the soil—a kind of magic power to reignite flashes of youth, as if to dig were akin to reciting a spell for conjuring up the lost past.”

his hand poised to begin writing or in a pause from the writing that he has momentarily interrupted. In the second stanza, we are referred outward from the poet’s workplace and vantage point (“Under my window”) to the garden, in which his father is digging. While he is watching his father and listening to the sounds of the shovel scraping the earth, he drifts into a reverie. In a set of lines akin to a cinematic dissolve and flashback, the present-day father, an aging man now, bends down but comes up again as he was twenty years earlier: “I look down / / Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds / Bends low, comes up twenty years away / Stooping in rhythm through potato drills / Where he was digging.” By the fourth stanza, we have shifted to an entirely subjective space of memory, in which the poet reappears as a boy.

This stanza, with its strange translation of the father back in time in the act of digging, is crucial to the thematic development of the poem. Though ultimately it is the poet’s own imagination and memory that is bringing about this transformation, he presents it at this point as if it were the father’s digging in the garden that has allowed him to tap into an earlier time. The poet lends his father’s digging—the real physical labor of grubbing in the soil—a kind of magic power to reignite flashes of youth, as if to dig were akin to reciting a spell for conjuring up the lost past. Yet Heaney wants to suggest that for his grandfather and father, digging was indeed a way of connecting with the past, of making contact with age-old customs and rhythms of Irish rural life. For them, tradition was no written history, but rather the elemental smells, textures, and sounds of country labor such as harvesting potatoes and cutting the peat-moss “turf” for fuel. The poet-son is divided from this tradition by time, education, and his vocation of writing. For him, in contrast to his elders, Irish history has become, at least in part, a body of written texts rather than the feelings and perceptions of a peasant body laboring on the land. But the memory evoked by the sound of his father’s digging carries him back to forgotten moments of his childhood and reminds him of a time when he still did have contact with the elemental realities which his father and grandfather experienced in everyday life.

These boyhood experiences, notably, revolve around his participation in the labor of the father and grandfather. Thus, for example, in the fourth stanza, he recalls helping his father gather the potatoes the father’s spade had rooted up: “He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep / To scatter new potatoes that we picked / Loving their cool hardness in our hands.” Heaney evokes the pleasure of the scene, subtly mingling the child’s love of his father with the sensual texture and scent of a potato dug fresh from the earth. In turn, the mature poet’s remembrance of these scents and feelings becomes a covert way of recapturing a closeness to his father possible only for a young child, the unqualified admiration and love of a little boy for his father. Momentarily drawing back from memory into the present, the fifth line dramatizes the mature man’s sense of astonishment at recapturing a hint of the boy’s utter self-abandonment to the “miracle” of his father at work: “By God, the old man could handle a spade.” In turn, this leads him to another link back in the chain of memories: “Just like his old man.”

The memory of the grandfather is linked to even more elemental realities, milk and sod. As if transporting the poet mentally back toward infancy, this stanza shifts the sensual character of the images from the “cool hardness” of the round new potatoes to a more formless, liquid set of images. “I carried him milk in a bottle / Corked sloppily with paper”: the impression a reader gets from these lines is of milk sloshing over the edge of the glass as the boy trots along, the paper cap becoming soggier with every step. Similarly, the grandfather is digging among the partly decayed, tangled roots of peat in the damp bog, throwing the pieces over his shoulder. If the father is rooting up the hard, round potatoes near the surface with a spade, turning the soil over to expose them for the children to gather, the more distant grandfather is “falling to it” with the turf cutter’s blade, slicing deep into the soft tissues of the earth, “going down and down” into the more archaic levels of the soil for the “good turf.”

The next stanza confirms this regressive movement back into an infantile, formless world of elemental sounds and smells: “The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap / Of soggy peat.” Yet the continuation of that fantasy pulls the poet up short, severing the family roots he has been tracing back into the Irish soil: “the curt cuts of an edge / Through living roots awaken in my head. / But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.” The interruption of the poem’s powerful movement into the past seems to render literal the imagined “cutting of roots” of which the image speaks. His father dug potatoes; his grandfather dug turf; but he has no spade with which to dig. He cannot connect himself to the soil like his father and grandfather did; hence the tradition that they formed must remain alien to him.

Not having a spade, the instrument of physical labor, moreover, would also seem to represent a loss of the masculine potency so marked in the men of his line. Heaney’s image of his father’s “shaft,” “firmly levered,” his burying “the bright edge deep” in the soil, and the depiction of his grandfather thrusting his sharp blade deep into the damp turf, is strongly shaded with sexual connotations. With a disturbing violence that Heaney seems here to celebrate, these virile male figures tear open and harvest the fruits of the dark, feminized soil. But time, having severed the “living roots” that would connect the poet to these diggers, also emasculates the son. The poet’s generation, it is suggested, no longer has the phallic power for such feats as breaking open virgin turf or churning up the new potatoes from their womb of earth.

The poet’s pen, however, offers him another way to reconnect himself to this legacy and regain his masculine power. He will “dig with it.” His digging, of course, will no longer be the literal labor of turning over the soil, but rather a poetic excavation of the layers of memory in which the real digging of his ancestors, linked to the soil through labor, persists. The “squat pen” of the poet will gain virile strength by imitating in the medium of writing what his fathers and forefathers performed for centuries in the medium of the Irish soil. The mute, manly power that once allowed his grandfather to perform heroic feats of turf cutting will get narrowed and concentrated into the gun-trigger tension of the poet’s hand, tightly gripping his pen and writing short, terse, cutting verses. With the same combination of rugged force and violence with which his ancestors dug, unconsciously connecting with the tradition hidden in the soil, he will consciously pursue a rough, manly, muscular style that will continue the work of rural labor in an analogous language of poetry

Source: Tyrus Miller, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1999.

Morton D. Rich

Morton D. Rich is an associate professor of English at Montclair State University who teaches writing and contemporary literature. He is guest editor of the Spring 1999 issue of Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines. In the following essay, Rich explores the relationship Heaney presents between digging in the earth and digging for meaning with words.

“Digging” is a nostalgic poem. In it, Seamus Heaney responds to a question many artists ask: How shall I justify the most important activity of my life—my art—when all of the world seems to be doing something more useful? He wonders if he can abandon the traditions of the family farm and adopt a new way of being in the world. “Digging” celebrates living on the land far more than it offers a tribute to writing poetry, yet it promises that poetry will carry forward a new kind of handwork, thereby honoring his forbears, those who took pride in “Stooping in rhythm through potato drills” and “Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods.”

The speaker does not claim to have their skill yet, only his tool, presented in surprising language: “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.” This couplet offers a plain enough image of the writer holding a pen between finger and thumb, but why is it “squat” and “snug as a gun”? Pens are usually long and sleek, not short and thick. The verb “squat” means to hunker down, a potentially uncomfortable position, perhaps implying how a poet works, were he digging potatoes in a field. The sound of the word is unpleasant and uncomplimentary to the pen and the speaker. Does he judge himself harshly for writing rather than farming? The image is complicated and intensified by the ending phrase “snug as a gun.” How is a pen comparable to a gun? Is the speaker under siege and in need of a weapon to defend himself? From what? The four-beat meter of the couplet plus the sound patterns suggest something less than profound, a kind of bluntness not usually found in Heaney’s poetry. The repeated “u” of “thumb,” “snug,” and “gun” in monosyllabic words squeezes the focus of the couplet onto the last syllable

“... [‘Digging’] signifies the importance to Heaney of a statement of his beliefs about the fundamental value of writing poetry in a world of men laboring in the earth.”

of each line in an almost nursery-rhyme mode, and onto the image of the thumb and gun. Critic Roland Mathias writes that the “consonantal mis-rhyme here perhaps suggests the gap between the hand, the symbol of family inheritance, and the newly acquired weapon.” The old weapon is the spade, that sharp extension of the farmer’s hands. Is the new weapon, the pen, comparable to it in any way? We will see how the poem treats this image later, whether it be expansion or transformation of meaning.

Other questions are raised by the position of “Digging” in Heaney’s opus. As the first poem in Heaney’s first published collection, Death of a Naturalist, as well as the first poem in his Selected Poems 1966-1987 (1990), it signifies the importance to Heaney of a statement of his beliefs about the fundamental value of writing poetry in a world of men laboring in the earth. He does not disdain their labor—indeed he celebrates it—but he does need to establish the equivalent value of the poet’s work. Using digging as a metaphor for writing, Heaney shows the depth of his connection with his early life on the farm and the lives of his father and grandfather. By analogy, he credits them with preparing the way for his kind of digging. Curiously, several critics have quoted Heaney’s remark in his essay “Feeling into Words” that “‘Digging’ is a big coarse-grained navvy of a poem,” while ignoring other comments he makes that are more significant. He writes: “‘Digging’, in fact, was the name of the first poem I wrote where I thought my feelings had got into the words, or to put it more accurately, where I thought my feel had got into words.... This was the first place where I felt I had done more than make an arrangement of words: I felt I had let down a shaft into real life. The facts and surfaces of the thing were true, but more important, the excitement that came from naming them gave me a kind of insouciance and a kind of confidence.... I now believe that the ‘Digging’ poem had for me the force of an initiation: the confidence I mentioned arose from a sense that perhaps I could do this poetry thing too, and having experienced the excitement and release of it once, I was doomed to look for it again and again.” The importance of digging as metaphor is underlined by his comment “I felt I had let down a shaft into real life.” Real life, for the poet, is not surface life, the life that poet and critic Stephen Dobyns calls a shell, “the temporal, finite, measurable world.” The poet, writes Dobyns, reaches into “another world that we attempt to measure not with our senses but with our emotions.” That is the work celebrated by Heaney in “Digging” and in his entire opus.

Examining the diction of “Digging,” that part of the whole language that Heaney has chosen for this poem, shows the reader a high proportion of farming words, for example: “digging, spade, gravelly ground, flowerbeds, potato drills, lug and shaft, turf, bog, sods, soggy peat, living roots.” These words are part of the everyday language of the farmer and the peat cutter who work the land and pass on their skills from generation to generation. However, the youngest generation of this family does not till the land but works words instead, naming the tools of writing with “fingers, pen, gun.” But in order to present and justify writing poetry as a legitimate activity, even if it does not produce turf or potatoes, Heaney uses the language of the land, not the language of the poet or critic. For Heaney, poetry begins in the earth, both literally and metaphorically, and his language reflects that origin beautifully. In his essay “The Sense of Place” he wrote: “And when we look for the history of our sensibilities ... it is to ... the stable element, the land itself, that we must look for continuity.”

Thus Heaney expresses in “Digging” a continuity that his forbears could not express in language. If he had become a farmer or sod cutter, he might have continued to work in the “stable element,” but his expressive consciousness would have been lost to the world. “Digging” tells us that the time has come for a deeper excavation, the kind that language provides both directly and by surprise.

Like many of Heaney’s poems, “Digging” is relatively brief, consisting of thirty-one lines in eight stanzas of irregular length. The pace of the poem is largely determined by the arrangement of sentences within the stanzas, rather than by a regular metrical scheme. The first stanza comprises a single, compact, self-contained sentence, rich with repeated vowels. (A grammarian would argue that “snug as a gun” is a separate elliptical sentence. For this reading, periods are used to define ends of sentences.) The second stanza has a sentence plus the beginning of another—“I look down”—that carries the reader’s eye smoothly into the third stanza, which completes the sentence. Twice the word “digging” ends sentences. This present participle as well as others—“rasping, straining, stooping, nicking, slicing”—help create an atmosphere of hard labor in the poem, labor the reader is invited to associate with writing poetry. The fourth stanza continues the narrative with two sentences, then the brief fifth stanza provides a transition to another, related narrative in the longest, four-sentence sixth stanza. The seventh and penultimate stanza brings together the two narratives and returns the speaker to the point of the poem. The last stanza, comprised of two sentences, varies and expands the first stanza.

Between my finger and my thumb 
The squat pen rests. 
I’ll dig with it.

The pen is no longer “snug as a gun,” but has become the writer’s spade, his tool for unearthing meaning. While critic Thomas Foster complains that the writing-digging connection is forced, the idea couched in the image is powerful enough to overcome its bluntness. The circle of the poem is completed by the transformation of the pen from a destructive gun to a tool for farming words. The poet has announced his intentions for his future writing.

One effect of generating the content of the poem in sentences of varying length, reserving three shorter sentences for the last two stanzas, is an increase in emotional intensity from beginning to end. Longer sentences require more unpacking of syntax—especially the triply embedded “I look down” that begins at the end of the second stanza— thus their impact is less immediate than shorter sentences. Perhaps paradoxically, however, the longer sentences that comprise the middle stanzas—containing rich images of the poet’s father and grandfather at work—create a cumulative emotional effect that opens the reader to the direct impact of the final three words. When Heaney writes “I’ll dig with it,” we are convinced, and ready for his next poem.

Source: Morton D. Rich, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1999.

Michael R. Molino

In the following excerpt, Molino asserts that Heaney’s poem “Digging” provides an example of how the author’s “act of poetic creation ... is permeated with his personal experiences and the tradition of his country and his race.”

Key to the poetry of Heaney is the question of tradition, but that question is tied to two other questions—that of language and that of myth. Collectively, the topics of tradition, language, and myth recur throughout Heaney’s poetry. In his early works, though, tradition, language, and myth are examined, at least to some extent, individually as Heaney sorts through his cultural and literary heritage. The fact that each of these issues is explored separately in succeeding volumes of poetry does not make them themes in the traditional sense—that is, unified, coherent, or isolated topics that, poetically rendered, either provide the writer or the reader access to the “Hidden Ireland” as Corkery envisioned it or act as the vehicle for reaching (or creating) a stable identity and origin. Rather, the questions of tradition, language, and myth, as they are explored in Heaney’s poetry, lead away from the notion of a Hidden Ireland or a stable origin rooted in a Celtic past and then passed on, broken but still potent, over the centuries. While I shall discuss tradition, language, and myth separately at first, it is important to see these as interrelated elements which constitute the “gapped, discontinuous, polyglot tradition” that [Thomas] Kinsella identifies as the Irish writer’s heritage.

In his poetry, Seamus Heaney explores the continuation of the past—manifest in the form of tradition, language, and myth—in the present and evaluates the molding effect that the past has had on himself and his culture. Heaney looks for the past in himself and in the people and places he knows best.... Heaney’s relationship with the past is ... complex: he does not poetically create voices whose utterances ascribe a moment in a singular, linear progression of tradition. Moreover, Heaney does not have a narrow political agenda that he wishes voiced through his poetry....

Throughout his career, Heaney has resisted the call to “conserve the past” as well the call to arms. He is neither a gentle yet plaintive pastoralist nor a defiant yet articulate patriot. In his early volumes, Heaney’s poetry resonates with voices that assimilate yet subvert these two, often contradictory, facets of his tradition. While tradition may provide a rich resource of experience for exploration, act as a source of continuity, or provide a sense of ready-made identity, it can also act as a deterrent to creative exploration, insist upon a singular or linear perspective on its own development, or repress the possibility of continued self-identification. Working with and through this complex web of tradition is difficult, but it is a necessary first step to understanding the question of tradition....

In Heaney’s verse, the influences of tradition are too strong and too much a part of his personal and cultural consciousness to be ignored. Tradition entails the beliefs and practices of the culture as well as the fact that it is not derived from a single, stable origin. Consequently, each time the speaker in one of Heaney’s poems forges a new utterance that excavates tradition that speaker both regenerates and subverts tradition in a complex interplay of sameness and difference—what [Jacques] Derrida [in his Writing and Difference] calls “originary repetition.”

In his first two volumes of poetry, Heaney stands between ... the assertion that the myths which constitute his tradition are “programmed into” his language and the assertion that these myths are always already inscribed by language. For instance, Heaney frequently probes tradition in an attempt to discern whether or how the Irish consciousness has been influenced or infected by its tradition....

Heaney, at least in his first two volumes of poetry, may be characterized as a postmodemist in the making, a writer inclined in the postmodem direction but still not fully immersed in a postmodern perspective of history, tradition, and the practice of writing....

In Death of a Naturalist and Door into the Dark, though, Heaney is primarily an explorer, charting his ground, then excavating and reinscribing tradition. For instance, in “Digging,” the first poem in Death of a Naturalist, the speaker in the poem, a writer, creates an analogy between his own work with a pen and the work of his father and grandfather with a spade. The title of the poem, “Digging,” is in the form of a nonfinite verbal, which has voice and tense inflection. The word digging appears three times in the poem: the first in the present, “My father, digging”; the second in the past, twenty years away, recalled in a memory, “he was digging”; the third in reference to the grandfather, even further in the past, but in reference to a present moment, the single word sentence, “Digging.”

The poem begins as a recollection of events in tranquility—the speaker’s thoughts of his father and grandfather as farmers, men of the soil. The frame of the poem is the speaker sitting at his desk, pen “snug as a gun” in his hand. The second stanza initiates a sequence that lends itself to contrasting interpretations: the speaker hears the sound of his father digging in the garden below (the son looking down upon the father); the father bends low to thrust his spade into the earth and “comes up twenty years away / Stooping in rhythm through potato drills.” The father “twenty years away” could be the speaker remembering a past event that parallels or echoes the present, or the father could be digging (in an archaeological sense) to a time far “away,” each spadeful apparently bringing him closer to the past, his origins.

The fact that the father has some kind of “rhythm” implies the naturalness of his actions, although it could be the speaker’s perception of the father being in harmony with nature, a trait the speaker feels he does not share. Similarly, the speaker’s grandfather spent his days, “going down and down / For the good turf. Digging,” as if the depth of the soil holds a special secret.

The second-to-last stanza is significant because it could be either a moment of continuation or a moment of rupture in tradition: “The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap / Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge / Through living roots awaken in my head.” The smells and the sounds of digging, as well as the cuts of the spade in the turf, “awaken” in the speaker’s head. Are these synaesthetic sensations triggering memories that the speaker recalls in his contemplative state—that is, are the “smell,” the “squelch and slap,” and the “cuts” memories awakened in the speaker’s mind as he looks down upon his father digging? Or, is the act of digging turf also the act of excavating the speaker’s personal heritage (his lineage through his father and grandfather) or his mythic/historical heritage (a connection with a tradition of soil and land)?

Both interpretations are invited by the images of the son, the father, and the grandfather—ancestral echoes of men of the soil. With the latter interpretation, though, the words squelch and slap resonate not only with experiences of life on the farm, but of political and social repression. The words smell and cuts evoke not only images of cutting turf, but of battles fought and lives lost throughout a history of violence. The paradox of digging is that it is both an act that bonds the generations as well as an act that severs “living roots.” Digging is, then, both a productive and a destructive act. The poem ends as the speaker chooses to continue his digging, not with a spade but with a pen.

Digging, however, does not merely uncover layers of historical violence or take someone, such as the speaker’s father, back to a stable origin or past; digging itself is a form of violence, as the image of the gun implies. Digging with a spade or with a pen not only uncovers but also severs the living roots of the past....

The act of digging into the turf—like excavating the peat bogs of Jutland and Ireland in later poems—is not merely commemorated, but performed in the poem, for the poem is a form of digging. Furthermore, digging is more than a simple analogy; it represents a process of writing that recurs throughout Heaney’s poetry. Writing entails a conflation or juxtaposition of past events, memories of past events in the present, and the moment of utterance which, because it often resonates with ambivalent or contradictory impulses, can be a disruptive factor in the continuation of the speaker’s tradition. The connection between digging—with all its personal, political, historical resonances— and writing is the most important aspect of Heaney’s poetic imagination.

The word digging signifies an act that occurs always in the present, but that present moment may concern a memory of past events. Thus, in “Digging,” the father and the grandfather are captured in a continually present moment as events from the past continue, or echo, in the present. The act of writing, like that of digging, is a consistently present moment that, while inhabited by echoes of the past, truncates and reinscribes those echoes as they occur. In other words, the tradition that has so influenced Heaney and of which he often writes is not evolving in any linear or teleological sense, even though some may read it as such. Each poem has the potential to contribute to that apparent evolution or progression of tradition, but it also has the potential to create a rupture in that tradition. Tradition, like the “self,” is a collection of discursive surfaces inscribed by language and open to the free-play of language. No single meaning is possible, and no place of origin exists outside this free-play of language. Thus, one cannot expect to arrive at a form of meaning external to language....

Many critics have noted that Heaney is tentative about the value of poetry in his early volumes, constantly needing to justify the act of writing poetry in relation to more practical pursuits, such as digging potatoes, thatching a roof, or forging a

“In Heaney’s verse, the influences of tradition are too strong and too much a part of his personal and cultural consciousness to be ignored.”

horseshoe. In “Personal Helicon,” that lack of assurance lingers, but the speaker realizes that the act of writing locates him within a tradition, just as the memory of his father and grandfather did. And, just as the speaker had to situate himself in relation to his ancestors in order to discern his own continually shifting identity against the discursive surfaces of his tradition, so too the speaker discovers that the poetic utterance is the point at which that tradition and his identity intersect and that the utterance recovers or discovers a discursive plurality and grasps the numerous discursive sequences that constitute his tradition....

“Digging” and “Personal Helicon,” respectively the first and last poems in Death of a Naturalist, establish a framework that recurs throughout Heaney’s other poetry. His poetry is one in which the act of poetic creation or articulation is permeated with his personal experiences and the tradition of his country and his race. As Heaney state[d in Terrence Brown’s Northern Voices: Poets from Ulster], “Our sense of the past, our sense of the land and perhaps our sense of identity are inextricably interwoven.” Even the persona or speaking voice in these two poems, as in many of Heaney’s poems, is a poet or writer, a person actively engaged in excavating, examining, interpreting, and reinscribing his own experiences and tradition.

The speaker in Heaney’s poems does not wish to blend with the events of the poem, to become one with the objects of his poetic vision, as Keats suggests in his “Ode to a Nightingale.” Rather, it is that difference between self and past, of self and tradition, that is all-important.

Source: Michael R. Molino, “A Question of Tradition” in Questioning Tradition, Language, and Myth: The Poetry of Seamus Heaney, Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1994, pp. 2–15.

Sources

Andrews, Elmer, The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: All Realms of Whisper, Macmillan Press Ltd., 1988, 219 p.

Di Piero, W. S., “Digs,” in The American Scholar, Vol. 50, No. 4, Autumn 1981, pp. 558–62.

Foster, John Wilson, “The Poetry of Seamus Heaney [On Wintering Out],” in Critical Essays on Seamus Heaney, edited by Robert F. Garratt, New York: G. K. Hall, 1995, p. 27; reprint of “The Poetry of Seamus Heaney [On Wintering Out],” Critical Quarterly, Spring 1974, pp. 35–48.

Heaney, Seamus, “Feelings into Words,” in The Poet’s Work: 29 Masters of 20th Century Poetry on the Origins and Practice of Their Art, edited by Reginald Gibbons, Houghton Mifflin, 1979, pp. 263–82.

Jeffery, Keith, ed., Northern Ireland: The Divided Province, Crescent Books, 1985, 128 p.

Kennedy-Pipe, Caroline, The Origins of the Present Troubles in Northern Ireland, Addison Wesley Longman Limited, 1997, 204 p.

Lloyd, David, “‘Pap for the Dispossessed’ [Heaney and the Postcolonial Moment]” in Critical Essays on Seamus Heaney, p. 122; reprint of “‘Pap for the Dispossessed’ [Heaney and the Post-colonial Moment]” in Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-colonial Moment, Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1993, pp. 20-37.

Tonge, Jonathan, Northern Ireland: Conflict and Change, Prentice Hall Europe, 1998, 218 p.

For Further Study

Buttell, Robert, Seamus Heaney, Cranberry, NJ: Associated

University Presses, Inc., 1975.

Provides critical analyses of the poems included in Heaney’s first three volumes and considers how Heaney’s personal experience and literary education have influenced his poetry.

Morrison, Blake, Seamus Heaney, New York: Methuen, Inc., 1982.