Digging

Seamus Heaney

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound

When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down 5

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 10

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.

By God, the old man could handle a spade. 15

Just like his old man.

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 20
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 25

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 rests. 30
I'll dig with it.
WORD LIST
Line 2 squat Crouch or sit; short and broad
Line 6 rump hindquarters of a man or animal
Line 10 coarse rough
Line 18 bog a deposit of dead plant material
Line 24 turf the surface layer of fields and pastures
Line 26 peat decomposed vegetable matter

Seamus Heaney (1939–2013)

He was an Irish poet, playwright, translator and lecturer, and the recipient of the
1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. In the early 1960s, he became a lecturer in Belfast
after attending university there and began to publish poetry.

Heaney was a professor at Harvard from 1981 to 1997 and its Poet in Residence
from 1988 to 2006. From 1989 to 1994 he was also the Professor of Poetry at
Oxford.

Analysis

We start off with poet, sitting at his desk ready to write. He gets distracted by the
sound of his father outside in the garden, and this starts a spiral of memories about
his father working in the potato fields when the speaker was a young boy and then
even further back to his grandfather and the hard work he did to complete the
harvest. Eventually, our speaker snaps out of his daydream, and we find him back at
his desk, ready to get to work on his writing.

STANZA 1

Lines 1-2

The image is created of a man sitting at his desk. The pen is “squat” from a lot of use
and it feels “snug” since it make the writer feel safe and at home. Then the speaker
hurls a surprising simile at us. In his hand, the pen feels like a gun. What is strange
is that we typically think of writing as something peaceful and pensive, which is what
the word "snug" makes us think of – snuggled up, tight, secure.

Our speaker, however, jolts us to realisation by saying that writing is like holding a
gun, which conjures up images of violence and unrest.
STANZA 2

Lines 3-4

The writer is startled by the sound of someone digging outside, using a spade, or
shovel, and it's making a rasping sound when it cuts into the earth. There is once
again a contrast between "Clean" and "rasping" "Clean" is much more smooth and
polished since this is how sees the task that his father is fulfilling. It is manual labour
but it is a pure task. Regardless of the initial contradiction, a "clean rasping sound" is
the shovel being thrust quickly (and cleanly) into the ground. The sound is quick and
clean, but you can detect the subtle rasp of the metal passing the tiny stones in the
soil's gravel.

Line 5

Now we come to realise that it his father digging in the soil.

STANZA 3

Lines 6-7

Our speaker watches from the window as his dad bends, digging among the
flowerbeds. He is working hard “straining”. As his father comes up from his work we
flashback to twenty years earlier. Take note that his father is digging flowerbeds,
since this is relevant later in the poem.

Lines 8-9

The poet thinks back to when his father was still a potato farmer. It seems the rhythm
of the father bending and rising in his garden has sparked this flashback – it's the
same pattern he used to follow in the potato drills, dipping down into the ground,
then coming back up.

There is also a shift to the past tense as we enter the memory of the past. Since his
father is now older, he can no longer perform all this physical labour but enjoys the
process of working with the earth.

Lines 10-11

The boot of his father can be seen as “coarse” from all the hard work. A lug is the top
of the blade of the spade, which sticks out on either side of the handle. His father
steps on the lug, putting all his weight on it to sink the tool into the ground, so he can
dig his hole. The fact that the shaft is “levered firmly” shows that his father is adept at
what he is doing. He has been doing it for many years.

NOTE: We now have three tools that have mentioned in the poem: the pen the gun
and the spade.

Line 12

The speaker's father is still busy rooting out the potatoes in the field. The “bright
edge” makes reference to the spade and its being made of metal. The alliteration of
“tall tops" and "buried the bright edge" makes it sound mechanical: as if his dad is a
machine as he works with the repetition of the task every day.

Line 13-14

Until this point the speaker has only described his father working in the field but now
he also includes himself “we”. The "cool hardness" refers to the way the potato feels
when it's pulled from the earth, almost like a rock but it almost seems as if he looks
at the potato with reverence “loving”. We see the sense of achievement he gets from
the work that he is performing.

Note: that in the present he holds the pen with the same loving touch.

STANZA 5

Lines 15-16

In these lines we jump even further into the past as the speaker is reminded of his
grandfather. We can clearly see the respect that the speakers has for both his father
and his grandfather and skill with which they performed their task “By God”. Not only
does work seem important to our speaker, but tradition, too – or work as part of the
family tradition. He comes from a long line of diggers, and he seems pretty proud.
This is further emphasized by pacing these two lines in a stanza of their own.

STANZA 6

Lines 17-18

Our speaker is reaching even further back into the family history to the time when his
grandfather dug for turf, and evidently, was very good at it. A bog is a patch of wet,
muddy ground, covered in peat, or turf, which forms the grassy top layer. The peat
makes for a great fuel and fertilizer, so Irishmen used to harvest the peat by cutting it
from the bog and saving it for later use.
The reference to “Toner’s bog” being the place where his grandfather worked is
puzzling since it does not exist. Since he mentions the place by name it makes the
reader feel part of the description and the experience. The speaker seems to be
addressing those in the know, or people who are familiar with the traditions of potato
farming and peat harvesting. He is creating a setting for the reader.

Lines 19-20

The speaker includes himself in the experience once again. This is a memory of him
as young child. He speaker takes him fresh milk with paper shoved in the top as a
stopper while his grandfather works in the bog, and his grandfather takes a brief
break from all his hard work to have a sip. The paper cork also shows that the
speaker is still very young and that he was too small to see the impracticality of his
action.

Lines 21-22

The speaker’s grandfather only allows himself a quick break before getting right back
to work. Heaney describes how he cuts into the ground with his spade – "nicking and
slicing neatly." This task does not include hard labour but a fair amount of skill too..
The grandfather's technique and efficiency are similar to what we saw from the father
earlier in the poem.

Line 23-24

Jumping right from lines 22-23, we see the grandfather continuing to grind away
throwing the turf over his shoulder as he goes. The "good turf" he's after is the
nutrient rich ground that is good for using as fuel or fertilizer. The phrasing in this line
reenacts the steady and difficult process involved in digging "down and down…
Digging." Both the father and the grandfather seem to be pretty hard-working, tough
men, and these lines continue to emphasise that fact by calling our attention to the
grandfather's constant effort.

Lines 25-26

The speaker brings up the smell of potato mold, the sounds of the peat bog, and the
cuts of the spade as it digs down into the earth. The poet emphasises our most of
our senses: he smell of the ground, the touch of the “cold”. Then the onomatopoeia
that reinforces our overload in senses “squelch” and “slap” and also the internal
rhyme of "cold" and "mould".

Line 27

In this line we see that the memories brought up by his father and grandfather
working also bring up the idea of family “roots”. They are "living roots" because the
memories are alive in him as he watches his father in the flower bed.
Line 28

In this line we see a turning point in the poem. Based on how much he admires his
father and grandfather, it would be easy for us to assume that the speaker would
follow in their footsteps and become a digger, too. The speaker has not become a
digger like his father or his grandfather because he doesn't have the proper tool for
digging. While at first we thought our speaker was a part of his family's tradition,
we're now seeing him as a bit of an outsider.

STANZA 8

Lines 29-31

The poet comes back to the beginning of his poem with the repetition in the last
lines. In doing so, he manages to show he is following in the tradition of his father
and grandfather. He's just using a different tool and a different method. While his dad
and grandpa dug with spades, our speaker plans to dig with his pen. Even though he
does not dig in the ground like his father and grandfather he will dig with the “what
and how” being different. He is trying to "unearth" certain things too; he wants to dig
into his past, his roots, to give proper recognition to amazing men. The last lines of
the poem show how the speaker carries on the tradition of work and "digging" in his
own work, different as it may be.

Questions

1. Identify the figure of speech in line 2.

2. Why is it effective?
3. How does the poet view both his father and grandfather?
4. Why are lines 15-16 written all on their own?
5. By looking at stanza 6; how do we know the grandfather took his job seriously?
6. We see that the poet did not go into the same line of work as his father and
grandfather. How is his job still similar to theirs?

Answers

1. Simile
2. The pen is a powerful tool of expression – the modern version of the pen is
mightier than the sword.
3. He feel pride towards them, he admires their hard work.
4. This emphasizes the admiration he has for both and it also indicates the shift
from the father’s description to the grandfather’s.
5. When the speaker brought him milk as a child, his grandfather just drank the milk
and went straight back to work.
6. Even though he does not dig in the ground like his father and grandfather he will
dig with the “what and how” being different. He is trying to "unearth" certain
things too; he wants to dig into his past, his roots, to give proper recognition to
amazing men.