Digging

 //"Digging explores the gaps that exist between father and son, between past and present, between agricultural and cultural labour, and between the aspirations of the individual and the expectations of his first community."// Carolyn Meyer

//Digging//, the first poem of his first collection, //Death of a Naturalist// (1966), is quoted in almost every discussion of Heaney’s work because it is almost a statement of the themes that would dominate his poetry: his sensual love of his native ground; his fascination with work and all kinds of tools; his vision of poetry as a traditional, laborious, and sustaining craft, like farming. The most important thing about //Digging//, is that it takes the form of a promise, a commitment from the poet to his father and grandfather, whose lives were spent literally digging the soil. Heaney acknowledges that he is not a farmer, and will not follow their vocation. In this poem Heaney is writing when he is drawn to sounds from outside where his father is digging in the garden. He remembers when he was a child and his father digging potatoes and then he thinks about his grandfather digging turf.  I have added the following words from Heaney as he sees these lines as a confirmation of his own role of the poet as diviner: Implicit in these lines is a view of poetry which is implicit in the few poems I have written that give me any right to speak: poetry as divination, poetry as revelation of the self to the self, as restoration of the culture to itself; poems as elements of continuity, with the aura and authenticity of archaeological finds, where the buried shard has an importance that is not diminished in the importance of the buried city; poetry as a dig, a dig for finds that end up being plants. (‘Feeling into Words’ in //Preoccupations//, p. 41.)  Heaney’s poetry does seem to be informed with this idea of ‘digging’. He appears to be digging to excavate and reveal not only his own personal past, but the past of his own language and culture itself. For instance Heaney has said of //The Bog// poems that he “began to get an idea of bog as the memory of the landscape, or as landscape that remembered everything that happened in and to it.” Heaney concludes ‘Feeling into Words’ with an affirmation of his “responsible //tristia//” (‘Exposure’) <span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif">I began by suggesting that my point of view involved poetry as divination, as a restoration of the culture to itself. In Ireland in this century it has involved for Yeats and many others an attempt to define and interpret the present by bringing it into significant relationship with the past, and I believe that effort in our present circumstances has to be urgently renewed. But here we stray from the realm of technique into the realm of tradition, to forge a poem is one thing, to forge the uncreated conscience of the race, as Stephen Dedalus put it, is quite another, and places daunting pressures and responsibilities on anyone who would risk the name of poet. <span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif"> In the next section Seamus Heaney discusses //Digging//: <span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif">In fact, //Digging// was the first poem I wrote where I thought my feelings had got into words, or to put it more accurately, where I thought my //feel// had got into words. Its rhythms and noises still please me, although there are a couple of lines in it that have more of the theatricality of the gunslinger than the self-absorbtion of the digger. I wrote it in the summer of 1964, almost two years after I had begun to "dabble in verse." This was the first place where I felt that I had done more than make an arrangement of words; I felt that I had let down a shaft into real life. <span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif">The pen/spade analogy was the simple heart of the matter and //that// was simply a matter of almost proverbial common sense. As a child on the road to and from school, people used to ask you what class you were in and how many slaps you'd got that day and invariably they ended up with an exhortation to keep studying because "learning's easy carried" and "the pen's lighter than the spade." <span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif">I don't want to overload //Digging// with too much significance. It is a big coarse-grained navvy of a poem.... it is interesting as an example of what we call "finding a voice." <span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif">Finding a voice means that you can get your feeling into your own words and that your words have the feel of you about them; and I believe that it may not even be a metaphor, for a poetic voice is probably very intimately connected with the poet's natural voice, the voice that he hears as the ideal speaker of the lines he is making up.


 * <span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif">Links: **

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif">The poem and reader responses at [|Poem Hunter]. <span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif">A critical appreciation of Seamus Heaney's work from [|Harvard Magazine]. <span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif">A discussion of [|Digging]. <span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif">