User:1TWO3Writer/Articles/Digging (poem)

Digging is a poem by Seamus Heaney, originally published in 1964 in New Statesman. It later was published in Death of a Naturalist, published by Faber and Faber. It is the first poem in the collection, followed by the poem The Barn.

Context
In his essay Feeling Into Words, originally published in Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978 and later excerpted into Finders Keepers, Heaney touches upon the creation of "Digging". Originally written in summer 1964, two years after he began to write poetry, Heaney states the poem was the first time his "feelings got into words". To him, other's opinions on the poem was irrelevant as it gave him a "kind of insouciance and ... confidence."

Summary
The speaker is sitting by his window, pen in-hand, when he hears the sound of shoveling below. He sees his father shoveling in the flowerbeds when time jumps back twenty years, him digging in potato drills. In detail, his father's shoveling is described, and the speaker remarks how skilled he is, just like his grandfather who dug more turf than "any other man on Toner’s bog." After recalling a time he gave his grandfather milk to drink, he concludes he will not become a farmer like them, instead he will use his pen and "dig with it."

Analysis
The poem is 31 lines long, broken up into 8 stanzas of free verse. It has a circular narrative, with the first line repeated in the last.

The central metaphors which encapsulates the poem surrounds the pen, with it being interpreted as a spade or a gun. The pen as a spade can be seen in the penultimate line of the poem, suggesting Heaney's view of poetry as a commitment and "as an act of cultural and historical retrieval." The pen as a gun emphasizes the power of poetry.

Jon Stallworthy, in his comparative article discussing Heaney and W. B. Yeats, says the poem's first stanza gives "us a glimpse of himself 'at his sedentary trade'". Introducing a selection of Heaney's poetry in The Wilson Quarterly, Helen Vendler writes that Digging was about Heaney's struggle to "reconcile his calling as a writer and his family's expectations." Professor William Pratt writes that Heaney "dug for words with his pen" in the poem.