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
 
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.
 
(1966)


 
Hello there!  Corinna Laughlin here with the Poem of the Week. We’ve been away for a while, but Scott, Lisa and I are back. We’ll bring you a new poem early in each month, and midway through the month we will share some poems you may have missed from the archives.  This week, we’re reading “Digging” by Seamus Heaney. Scott Webster will read the poem, and then I’ll be back to offer some brief commentary.
 
Thank you, Scott.
 
Seamus Heaney was born in 1939 in rural northern Ireland. He grew up surrounded by cattle dealers and farmers. A brilliant student, he attended a private Catholic boarding school on scholarship, and then went to Queen’s University, Belfast, where he discovered the poetry of Ted Hughes—and his own vocation as a poet.
 
Vocation is what this poem, “Digging,” is all about. One of Heaney’s most famous works, it appeared in his first collection, Death of a Naturalist, in 1966, when Heaney was 27 years old.
 
“Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.” Heaney is ready to write, but not yet writing – the pen “rests.” It is as “snug as a gun,” a comparison that works on a couple of levels: it emphasizes the perfect fit of the “squat pen” in his fingers, but it also suggests that the pen is powerful; Heaney holds it as though he is taking aim.
 
In the second stanza, Heaney “zooms out” to show us where he is – he must be at his father’s house, for outside the window his father is digging in the garden. He hears the “clean rasping sound” as the spade hits the gravel, and almost comically sees “his straining rump among the flowerbeds.” His father bends among the potatoes and comes up “twenty years away”—this digging has been his whole life.
 
I think we can pick up on a certain tension between the poet and his father. Notice the distance—the son is inside, the father outside; the son is above, the father below – “I look down.” It seems to be an emotional distance as well as a physical one.
 
But then the perspective shifts again and that distance disappears. “The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft / Against the inside knee was levered firmly.” He sees his father up close, how neatly and skillfully he digs, scattering the new potatoes which the children gather, “loving their cool hardness in our hands.” The poet marvels at what his father does: “By God, the old man could handle a spade. / Just like his old man.” We sense from the language that the poet’s grandfather was a legend in the village: “My grandfather cut more turf in a day / Than any other man on Toner’s bog.” The poet remembers, as a boy, bringing him milk, which he paused just long enough to drink, then immediately, eagerly resumed his work. And again, what Heaney remembers is the skill involved: “Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods / Over his shoulder, going down and down / For the good turf. Digging.”
 
Heaney’s descriptions of digging are extraordinary, evoking his intense memories of this work. This is “ASMR” long before the internet made it a hashtag! “The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap / Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge / Through living roots.” At the beginning of the poem, the poet was looking down, out of a window, watching his father dig; but now he is on the ground, delighting in the smell, the feel, the sound of digging.
 
“But,” he says, “I’ve no spade to follow men like them.” And he returns to where he started: “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.”
 
Heaney—poet, teacher, scholar—certainly experienced a disconnect with where he had come from; he chose a very different path from those cattle dealers and farmers. In this poem, he both acknowledges and, in a way, erases that distance. He places his vocation is in continuity with his father and grandfather. All that is different is the tool: they dug with a spade; he digs with a pen. For him, poetry is work—earthy work.
 
Sometimes, we humans tend to think of work as a curse—after all, it wasn’t until after the fall of Adam and Eve that they were told, “by the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread” (Genesis 3:19). But work is a blessing. In the words of the Second Vatican Council, “When human beings work they not only alter things and society, they develop themselves as well. They learn much, they cultivate their resources, they go outside of themselves and beyond themselves. Rightly understood this kind of growth is of greater value than any external riches which can be garnered.” (Gaudium et Spes, 35)  Work has tremendous dignity and value, and when we do it with all our strength and skill, we discover depths in ourselves we never knew we had.