Digging

Seamus Heaney

(1939-2013)

Digging

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

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.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.   

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

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 rests.

I’ll dig with it.

Much to like in this poem. Like all Irish people Heaney was familiar with "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland. The reference to a "gun" in the first two lines of the poem makes the point.

Between my finger and my thumb   

The squat pen rests; snug as a gun

Others have taken up the gun, Heaney, though, would make his mark with a pen. He goes on to note the skills of his father and grandfather as they dig for sod and potatoes. He admires them but his way will be different.

This is not uncommon now. At one time young men and women would follow their parents' paths. He has successfully avoided the violence of The Troubles and found his own way. Not better than his father and grandfather but very different.

Listen to the poet recite Digging.

Seamus Heaney is widely recognized as one of the major poets of the 20th century. A native of Northern Ireland, Heaney was raised in County Derry, and later lived for many years in Dublin. He was the author of over 20 volumes of poetry and criticism, and edited several widely used anthologies. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past."