“DIGGING”,
SEAMUS HEANEY
1.
POSTMODERNISM
Related to Postmodernist Poetry, we have to list the
followings:
-
Iconoclasm: it denies
authority to the author, discounting his intentions and his claim to act as a
spokesman for a period. The expected is also contradicted, often deliberately
alienating the reader. We can find irony, parody… (http://www.textetc.com/modernist/postmodernism.html)
-
Groundless: Flat,
media-like images that have no references beyond themselves are employed. The
poets also regard both art and life as fictions, sometimes mixing the two in
magic realism or multiple endings. They also argue that meaning is
indeterminate, denying a final or preferred interpretation. (http://www.textetc.com/modernist/postmodernism.html)
-
Formlessness:
Postmodernists repudiate modernism’s preoccupation
with harmony and organic form. They also fragment texts, turning them into
collages or montages and they avoid the shaping power of metaphor and other
literary tropes too. (http://www.textetc.com/modernist/postmodernism.html)
-
Populism:
Postmodernists employ material from a wide social spectrum and they avoid all
that is serious and responsible, promoting the arbitrary and playful. Moreover,
they encourage audience to participate, (http://www.textetc.com/modernist/postmodernism.html).
2. SEAMUS HEANEY
Seamus Heaney was born in April of
1939 as the eldest of nine children at the family farmhouse called Mossbawn, near Castledawson, in
Heaney grew up as a country boy
attending
In 1957 Heaney travelled to
In 1963 he met Philip Hobshaum, who set up a Belfast Grouo
of local young poets, which brought Heaney to be in contact with other poets of
the town. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seamus_Heaney).
Although he is stylistically and temperamentally different from those other
writers, he does shares with all of them the fate of having been born into a
society deeply divided along religious and political lines. This had the effect
not only of darkening the mood of his work in 1970, but also of giving him a deep
preoccupation with the question of poetry responsibilities and prerogatives in
the world. (http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1955/heaney-bio.html)
In 1965 he married Marie Devlin. In
the same year, his first book, “Eleven Poems”, was published. In the following
year, Faber and Faber published his first volume called “Death of a
Naturalist”, which made him win a lot of awards. In 1968, Heaney took part in a
reading tour called “Room to Rhyme”. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seamus_Heaney)
After a lot of publications, he was
awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in
Lat year, 2006, Heaney suffered a
stroke, from which he recovered, but he had to cancel all his public engagement
for some months. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seamus_Heaney)
Related to his features, his work
often deals with everything that surrounds him. This means
Finally,
his influence is not restricted to
3.
“DIGGING”
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.
Under my window a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. 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.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man
could handle a spade,
Just like his old man.
My grandfather could cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, digging down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
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.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.
(http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/digging)
4.
ANALYSIS OF THE POEM: “Digging”
In 1966, Seamus
Heaney published his first collection of poems, called “Death of a Naturalist,
which deals with the loss of childhood innocence and the following transitions
into adulthood. In this collection of poems, we are shown his admiration for
his ancestors, his own distorted view of nature and why he became a writer. (http://www.faber.co.uk/author_detail.html?auid=1996
and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seamus_Heaney)
The first poem of
that collection is “Digging”, which is the reconciliatory expression of an
artist who will not follow in his father and grandfather’s
footsteps as a common labourer. It concerns his admiration for his father’s and grandfather’s skill
at digging. (http://www.universalteacher.org.uk/poetry/heaney.htm)
This poem is a free
verse poem with eight stanzas containing two couplets. In addition, there is no
consistent rhyme scheme, although it has some rhymes: “thumb” and “gun” (in the
first two lines); “sound”,
“ground” and “down” (in the second stanza); and “men like them” (line 28).
Moreover, it is
written in first person narrative; we can see that in the first line of the
first stanza: “Between my finger and my thumb”.
Related to the title,
it is only when we have read the poem carefully when we realise that all the
three generations are involved in digging: his grandfather dug turf, his father
dug up potatoes, and he is digging up his memories and his past. So, the title
is good and right, because
reading it we can guess more or less about what we are going to be told in the
poem; at least we can guess that the poem deals with digging.
Now, we are going to analyses the tenses used
by Heaney: the poem begins in the present tense as Seamus Heaney describes
seeing his elderly father straining among the flowerbeds, then it goes into the
past tense when he remembers his father and grandfather at work. The last two
stanzas return to the present, when Heaney realises that his work is to write.
Ant the end, in the final line, however, it is in the future tense, to
emphasise Seamus Heaney’s determination “I’ll dig”.
This poem symbolises the changing face of
As we have said before, the poem is divided
into eight stanzas, which we are going to analyse one by one.
In the first stanza, Heaney starts his poem
introducing to us his pen. He says that it rests in his hand “snug as a gun”.
This quote “snug as a gun” (line 2) gives the impression that the pen fits
naturally in his hand.
In the second stanza, he is looking down from
his window to see his father digging. This stanza is perfectly connected with
the following one, in which we find he is looking back twenty years to the same
place where his father was digging. The pause between these two stanzas
indicates the gap that gap in the time.
Seamus Heaney continues describing how his
father worked until the fifth stanza, in which he introduces his grandfather,
who was a digger too. In the sixth stanza he remembers one day he went to see
how his grandfather worked.
In the penultimate stanza, Heaney gives us “the
cold smell of potato mold” (line 25), the sound
of “squelch and slap” (line 25)… all this, help us to make
more vivid what he describes. Moreover in that stanza he realises that his work
is writing and not digging: “I’ve no spade to follow men like them”
(line 28).
In the last stanza Heaney repeats the opening
lines “Between my finger and my thumb / the squad pen rest”. Now
the image of the pen as a gun is replaced by “I’ll dig it”.
So, now his pen becomes a metaphorical spade, which suggests that his pen is
like his took, as the spades were the tools of his father and grandfather. So,
he will continue with his work, digging in his memories through writing.
5. CONCLUSION
The poem, “Digging”, is, maybe, one
of the most important poems of Heaney, and it is also one of the most
representative poems of him, because in it we can find his most important
features as a writer: writing about everything that surrounds him, which means
“Digging” compares the poet’s
pen to the farmer’s spade, depicting Heaney’s
early struggle to define himself as a poet. That means that he will break the
family tradition of physical labour as an occupation. So, in my opinion, Heaney wrote this poem to
justify his decision to become a poet.