Raquel
Jordα Bresσ 27
IV 06
DIGGING
01 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:
05 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.
10 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.
15 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
20 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.
25 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
30 The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.
Heaney, Seamus. Digging, The death of a Naturalist. (PoemHunter)
ANALYSIS
Title ΰ Digging describes an action related to
turn over Earth or move round something.
It summarizes the main action described in the poem.
The poem talks about
Seamus Heaney fathers labour of digging the fields and the poets work of
digging poetry.
Seamus Heaney has
divided this poem into eight different stanzas in which only the two first are
structured with an assonantal rhyme; the first stanza a, a with thumb (L1)
and gun (L2) and the second stanza
b,b,b
with sound (L3), ground (L4) and down (L5).
Through the whole poem,
the author describes the act of digging the earth something he knew quiet
well since he grew up in a farm in County Derry, Northern Ireland and lived
there till the age of twelve when he
won a scholarship to St. Columbs College (Nobelprize) and compares this with the art of writing
poetry.
In the first stanza,
the poet sets the poem in a present time see rests (L2) and on a certain moment when he is writing as the squat pen rests (L2) in his hand.
The author also says that he is near a window
(L3) now in the second stanza and from there he hears the clean rasping sound (L3) of a spade (L4) that sinks into gravelly ground (L4). Thus he
glances down and founds his father
digging (L5).
Here we can think that the poet is making a metaphor with the spade (L4) and the pen(L2) both tools to work with and
that he also has put another metaphor with the gravelly ground (L4) in which the spade sinks meaning the paper where the
author looks for and engraves his poetry.
From now the second
stanza on to the sixth stanza, Seamus Heaney shows us what digging was like
when he was a child, twenty years away
(L7) and presents us his father that dig through
potato drills (L8).
It is in the fourth
stanza where the poet really makes a description of his fathers daily labour
his father being a symbol of all the Irish farmers.
The author uses either hard adjectives such
as coarse (L10), nestled (L10), firmly
(L11) or hardness (L14) or soft ones, like bright (L12), loving
(L14) or cool (L14), to paint the
image of the works his father took in order to raise new potatoes (L13) they see we
(L13) picked (L13) with their our (L14) hands (L14).
In the next stanza, with
only two line verses Seamus Heaney takes us even far away in the past by saying
that his father this old man
(L15) was able to handle a spade
(L15) just like his old man (L16),
the poets grandfather (L17).
In my opinion, in the
fifth stanza the poet, by presenting his father as making the same work as his
grandfather did make, enhances or remarks the fact that his family, his country
is a country of farmers since he knows about it and that it is what boys are
supposed to be when they grow up.
Then, in the sixth
stanza the author explains that his grandfathers job was the same job as that
of any other man on Toners bog
(L18), meaning every Irish men worked at fields. The poet also describes a
moment in his life when once (L19) he
gave his grandfather milk in a bottle
(L19) which the old man drank and then again the old man was digging down and down (L23), throwing
away earth over his shoulder (L23),
for the good turf (L24), meaning
they had nothing to do but dig fields to have something to take away into their
mouths. And that always by
God (L15).
Moreover, it is in the
seventh stanza where the poet recalls in his mind see awaken in my head (L27) the features of his childhood in Mossbawn, his
parents farm (Nobelprize): the cold smell of potato mold (L25) and
the squelch and slap (L25) of soggy peat (L26). Notice that the
poet uses those adjectives cold
(L25), squelch and slap (L25) and soggy (L26) to create the Irish
atmosphere of humidity, which is also the proper climate to raise potatoes, one
of the characteristic products of
But it is the last line
verse of the seventh stanza line 28 what summarizes the main idea the
author wants to show us; that he has no
spade to follow men like them.
Seamus Heaney is an Irishman and comes from a traditional family of
farmers but he will not become a farmer as well. And the reason for this is
both in the first and in the last stanza; it is because there is no spade in
his hand but the squat pen (L1 and
L30) resting. So he will dig with it
(L31).
I find this last stanza
and also the part in the first stanza line verse 2 where the poet describes
his pen as snug as a gun, as a
clear declaration of intentions.
Seamus Heaney got the
opportunity to leave the earth of farm labour to go to the heaven of
education (Heaney, S. Nobelprize) and from there
defend with his pen-gun how an Irish farmer life was like. He uses this pen
to dig through the fields of poetry to make his country a nation of proud
field workers maybe against the industrialized English world of the 20th
century.
PERSONAL OPINION
I found this poem very
interesting mainly because the repetition of the same idea and some words
in the first and last stanza, which also are the core of what Seamus Haeney wants to transmit. The equivalence of the pen as a gun (L2) is a powerful image and
made me pay more attention to what the poet tried to share with us, the
readers. I really enjoyed how through describing a so ordinary labour which is
that of digging the earth, he enhances his country and their rural habits as
being as traditional and honourable as that of writing.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Heaney,
Seamus. Digging, The death of a
Naturalist. PoemHunter.
22
Apr 2006
<
http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poem=33129
>
Nobelprize.org.
Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1995.
Ed. Tφre Frangsmyr (Nobel
Foundation),