Digging

1. Digging Seamus Heaney

2. Seamus Heaney • Seamus Heaney was born in Northern Ireland in 1939, the eldest child in what was to become a family of nine children. His father farmed 50 acres in rural County Derry and was a cattle dealer. Much of Heaney's poetry is centred on the countryside and farm life that he knew as a boy. He won a scholarship to the Catholic boarding school, St Columb's College, Derry, forty miles from home: he was here when his younger brother Christopher was killed, as described in Mid-Term Break. • He studied at Queen's University, Belfast and spent some years teaching. In 1965 he married Marie Devlin, and went on to lecture on poetry at his old university, Queen's, for six years (1966 - 72). • In the 1960s he belonged to a group of poets who, he said, used to talk poetry day after day. He has written many collections of poetry, the first of which was published in 1966. His later works capitalise on his knowledge of Latin, Anglo-Saxon and Gaelic and explore words and their significance. His translation of Beowulf, an Old English narrative poem, was published in 1999. • In 1982 he began teaching for one semester a year at Harvard University in the USA. He was appointed Professor of Poetry at Oxford University in 1989 and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. • He has lived with his family in Dublin in the Republic of Ireland since 1976.

3. Vocabulary In this poem Heaney sees his father, an old man, digging the flowerbeds. He remembers how his younger, stronger father used to dig in the potato fields when Heaney was a child - and how his grandfather, before that, was an expert turf digger. Heaney knows that he has no spade to follow men like them - he is a writer, not a farmer - so will dig with his pen. He will 'dig' into his past.

4. Language • Think about how the language the poet uses helps to convey his ideas. Here are some points to consider: • The title is blunt. It is only when we have read the poem carefully that we realise that all three generation are involved in digging: his grandfather dug turf, his father dug up potatoes, Heaney is digging up his memories and his past. • The poem begins in the present tense as Heaney describes seeing his elderly father straining among the flowerbeds, then goes into the past tense when he remembers his father and grandfather at work. The last two stanzas return to the present, when Heaney realises that his work is to write. The final line, however, is in the future tense, to emphasise Heaney's determination - 'I'll dig'. . • Heaney remembers his own role in the digging: he and other children would gather the new potatoes that his father dug up, and he was responsible for taking milk to his grandfather on Toner's bog. It was this involvement that enabled him to watch his father and grandfather at work and describe their movements so precisely:

5. Imagery The opening simileis striking - Heaney's pen is 'snug as a gun' (line 2). It shows how perfectly the pen fits his hand - and, accordingly, how well suited Heaney is to write. (In the fourth stanza Heaney describes how perfectly his father's body is in tune with the spade, showing how well suited he is to dig.) The gun image also suggests the strength of the pen: it is a weapon for writing. The enjambmentbetween the second and third stanza is dramatic, Heaney looks down from his window to see his father digging - and then we find he is looking back twenty years. The pause between the stanzas indicates the gap in time.

6. Sound • Look out for repetition through the poem. For example, how many times are the words dig and 'digging' used? What effect does this have? • Alliteration is used a lot to recreate the feel and sensation of digging: for example, 'the spade sinks into the gravelly ground' (line 4) - where the s sounds suggest the slicing of the blade through the earth, and the g sounds the gravelly resistance of the soil. • A few lines near the beginning of the poem have fairly conventional rhymes: thumb/gun, sound/ground/down; thereafter the poem is unrhymed, though there are repeated sounds such as the echoing ing sounds in 'nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods' (line 22)