Irish poet, playwright, and winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature Seamus Heaney has been called the greatest poet of our age. With works that often deal with the local surroundings of Northern Ireland, his books made up two-thirds of the sales of living poets in the U. K. in 2007 according to a BBC report. His first collection Death of a Naturalist (1966) begins with the poem Digging, a reflective look back at the achievements of the poet and speaker's father and grandfather who toiled in the soil of their homeland and the difficulties Heaney's desire to write and thereby choose his own future creates. (McIntyre) Because there is such a lot of "work" going on in the poem, I have chosen to adopt the Marxist role for analysing it.
Digging opens with the poet sitting at his writing desk looking out on his father digging in a flower bed. Heaney likens the pen he holds in this scene to a weapon, a weapon with which he protects himself from criticism about his choice of career. Stella McIntyre of helium.com suggests that Heaney looks down into the garden where he is digging from an elevated position, suggesting that the poet feels superior to manual work and that he is not comfortable with this feeling. In the third stanza, Heaney imagines his father twenty-years before as a potato farmer. He then goes on to describe his father's skills. In the fifth stanza, Heaney takes the reader even farther back in time to describe his grandfather's work as a turf farmer. Here the reader learns that working the land is a tradition in Heaney's family--a tradition that Heaney breaks by becoming a writer. The seventh stanza addresses the difficulties Heaney's desire to write causes. "The 'curt cuts through living roots' are not only the sharp edge of a spade cutting through living turf," writes McIntyre. "They are the sharp words spoken as Heaney cuts his ties with his family's traditional means of earning a living."
Ireland in the early 20th Century was a poor country. The levels of poverty in many isolated rural areas were exceptional by western standards. (http://www.muckross-house.ie/library-ireland-1930s-1940s.html) The majority of Ireland's population, including Heaney's father and grandfather, occupied small agricultural holdings during this time. Life was hard for these farmers and their willingness and ability to labor made the difference between providing for their often large families and having them starve.
In Digging, Seamus Heaney pays tribute to his ancestors ability to work with their hands--work and tradition are important to the poet and he is obviously proud of his father and grandfather--but he also cuts through his traditional roots with a career path that is vastly different.
"But I've no spade to follow men like them," Heaney writes in the second to last stanza of the poem. "Between my finger and my thumb, the squat pen rests. I'll dig with it."
References:
McIntyre, Stella. Poetry Analysis: Digging, by Seamus Heaney, helium.com. web.
Faces of the Week, BBC News, BBC, 19 January 2007.
Ireland in the 1930's-1940's, Muckross House, Gardens and Traditional Farms, muckross-house.com. web.
