Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen tests; 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.
My grandfather 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, going down and down
For the good turf, digging.
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.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like
them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen tests.
I’ll dig with it.
Poem:
Digging.
Extracted from: http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poet=6714&poem=33129
Author: Seamus
Heaney
Digging: Analysis and Comentary.
The poem
that we are going to analyse today is Digging, written by the irish poet Seamus
Heany, and published in the anthology Death of a Naturalist in 1966. the
poem is structured in eight stanzas: the first stanza has two verses; the
second, three; the third, four; the fourth, five; the fifth, two; the sixth,
eight; the seventh, fourth and the last stanza have three verses.
In the
poem, Heaney deals about one topic which is an obsession to him: the process of
writing, as we can see in some of his works, such as From the Frontier of
Writing (Vicente Forés). But
in this poem, this topic is secondary. Here the main topic is his family, his
roots.
Heaney
starts with two verses: Between my finger and my thumb/The squat pen tests;
snug as a gun. His pen is a gun, a weapon, something to attack, and the pen
is also something with whom Heany feels comfortable. In the second stanza, the
author is, we may think, writing in his dormitory when he hears something
outside: it is his father, working the land. In the third stanza the reader
realizes that the author is remembering something that has passed (Bends
low, comes up twenty years away, verse 7). In the fourth stanza, Heaney
describes how his father worked the land, how he collected potatoes. In the
fifth and sixth stanza, also remembers his grandfather, who was a hard-working
person. In the seventh stanza describes the land that his ancestors, the land
that he cannot work because he has no spade. But he has a pen, so he will dig
with it.
With
this poem Heaney wants to show that although times are changing, it is impotant
to hold something from the past, the values. He is proud of his father and his
grandfather, who had to work the land to eat. They were modest, plain people,
and he wants to go back to his roots in order to recover his identity.
In the
time that Heaney wrote the poem, 1966, was a turbulent period in
Heaney
also wants to say something else to the people who like to use the violence:
The Irish will go ahead, in spite of the terror used against them. Irish people
are strong; they survived the Great Famine, and they will resist and survive,
because they do not surrender so easily.
To sum
up, Digging is a pacifist poem, a poem against terrorist, but a poem
that says that they, Irish, will not surrender and will resist, and Heaney also
wants to say that we have to return, in our own way, to our roots, our origins,
we have to dig down and down for the good turf. And, mostly, that violence
never is the answer.
Bibliography.
ü
Vicente Forés. English Poetry of 19th and
20th Century. 27.04.2006.
ü
Poemhunter.com:
http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poet=67124&poem=33129
27.04.2006