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 father’s 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. Columb’s 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 father’s 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 poet’s ‘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 grandfather’s job was the same job as that of ‘any other man on Toner’s 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 parent’s 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 Ireland. And all these memories are not nor forgotten since they are ‘living roots’ (L27) in his head

            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. Paris, France.

 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), Stockholm, 1996 in Les Prix Nobel. Ed. PhD Karl Grandin karl.grandin@kva.se. 23 – Apr – 2006. < http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1995/heaney-bio.html >

 

 

READINGS