Department of English

Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University

"Digging"

(1966)

Seamus Heaney

(April 13, 1939 – August 30, 2013)

Notes

4  spade:

8  drills: 

• 1: A small furrow made in the soil, in which seed is sown; a ridge having such a furrow on its top; also, the row of plants thus sown. (Oxford English Dictionary)
  

10  lug: the shoulder or tread of the spade's blade where you can press down with your foot to push the blade into the earth when you dig

• lug (n.) (Oxford English Dictionary)
  
• 3: An object resembling the external ear.
• a: The handle of a pitcher, etc. Also techn. in various uses, denoting an appendage by which an object may be lifted or suspended
• b: ear: Mech. A projection on the side or edge of a piece of machinery or a tool; serving as a handle or attachment, as one of a pair of supports on opposite sides, or for other purposes.
  
• lug (n.) any piece that projects from a firearm for the purpose of attaching something to it. For example barrel lugs are used to attach a break-action shotgun barrel to the action itself. If the firearm is a revolver, the term may also refer to a protrusion under the barrel that adds weight, thereby stabilizing the gun during aiming, mitigating recoil, and reducing muzzle flip. A full lug extends all the way to the muzzle, while a half lug extends only partially down the barrel. On a swing-out-cylinder revolver, the lug is slotted to accommodate the ejector rod. (Wikipedia)

17  turf:

• The Irish Turf Spade
  

Life and Writing

Did the young poet who completed Death of a Naturalist become a different person (more self-conscious, more confident or more bewildered) in the writing of it from the one who composed the earliest poems in the book?

There was a new consciousness, yes, and probably some bewilderment when the book was published. But confidence, too, from the fact of having written the poems. In 1966 Marie and I were living on a housing estate on the outskirts of Belfast, a characterless sort of place, and I remember getting my six free copies, probably in late April. The actual book looked very good: a lime-green and solid-pink dust jacket, aknd on the back a list of the Faber poets. Fabulous names: Auden, Eliot, Hughes, Larkin, Lowell, MacNeice, Spender. It was certainly strange.

Three years before, I was somebody who'd had one poem in the Irish Times and one in the Kilkenny Magazine. But it's probably the same for everybody, the moment of publication; it's always a moment of change, the start of the 'Borges and I' condition. The autobiographical creature begins to be implicated in the textual masquerade; you begin to read and hear about this composite who has written the books, and sounds very like yourself, although there's always going to be a certain stand-off between the pair of you.

But at the time there must have been a lot of sheer delight? A man who 'has published a new book' is one of Yeats's images for high excitement... [end of page 61]

I was indeed excited. Mightily. But that afternoon, on my own in the new house, I was also very conscious of the mystery of what had happened—the ordinariness and, well, the election. I suppose I imagined that a poet published by Faber would be somebody in a realm apart, relieved of the usual botherations, acquainted with 'the shit in the shuttered château' and the bohemians in the pub. Not somebody with a job at a teacher-training college, with lectures to prepare and essays and exams to mark, taking his lunch at the staff table in the student dining room, listening to conversations about golf and life insurance.

Marie and I were very much the typical young marrieds of that period, with our teak furniture and our second-hand Volkswagen and, by that stage, Marie pregnant—or expectant, as the term was then. [...] That afternoon stands out, me in the house waiting for Marie to come home from school, waiting to give her her copy. Death of a Naturalist was dedicated to her. [...]

How large an element in the writing of the first collection was the fact that you and Marie were—in the terminology of the time—'courting'?

I met her in October 1962 and the next month I published what I consider to be the first poem where I was in earnest. I'm not saying that one thing was a direct consequence of the other. In the beginning, the pump is primed as much by other poetry as by other people; but still, there was definitely a new charge, a quicker flow. [...] But there was a poetry aspect to our first meeting, which was at a dinner to mark the retirement of the Queen's University chaplain. Marie was there as the guest of another graduate, but since we got on so well and she was in no particular relationship with him, I walked her back to the flat she shared with her sister. The road to her place, however, took us past my flat, so while we were en route I called in and came out with a copy of A. Alvarez's anthology, The [end of page 62] New Poetry, which I lent her—and which gave me an excuse to call back a day or two later to collect it. [...]

You have mentioned A. Alvarez's The New Poetry a couple of times. Clearly, it was an important anthology for you.

Very. For one thing, it's where I got my first sense of R. S. Thomas. I'd encountered Ted Hughes earlier, in the pamphlets the BBC used to issue with their schools broadcasts—a series called Listening and Writing, edited by this marvellous literary producer called Moira Doolin. But The New Poetry was a big stimulus. (64)

Your comment a short while ago about belonging to the Northern Catholic minority brought to mind Auden's remark that Yeats was 'hurt into poetry' by Ireland. Were the hurts you experienced, as an Ulster Catholic, among those which made a poet out of you?

[...] At that stage I was a graduate with a job, a self-respecting adult of sorts, but I was still subject to the usual old Northern Ireland reminders that I'd better mind my Fenian manners. The B-Special Constabulary were on the roads at night. The anti-Catholic speeches were still being delivered by Unionist leaders on the Twelfth of July. The whole gerrymandered life of the place seemed set to continue.

So it probably doesn't overstate things to call that a hurt, although it wasn't one that set you apart. In fact, it bonded you, and the recognition and the consequences of that very bonding would eventually become something the poetry had to deal with also. But in the beginning, there was a battened-down spirit that wanted to walk taller. [...] I'm certainly not saying that the simple fact of belonging to the minority made me a poet; but I am saying that, once a literary aspiration developed, it took account of the hurtful conditions. That would be true also for [end of page 65] the generation ahead of me, people like John Montague and Brian Friel, as well as for contemporaries like Seamus Deane.

Once you started teaching, did you live in Belfast all the year round?

I stayed in Belfast during term time and would go home to Bellaghy at Christmas and sometimes at weekends and always for the summer holidays. 'Digging' I wrote at home in The Wood in August 1964, upstairs in the bedroom. (68)

So those poems you've just mentioned—'Blackberry Picking' and so on—belong to early 1965: a period when, according to your own account, you 'wrote a hell of a lot'. Was this writing an act of will, to ensure you'd have enough poems for the first collection, or were you writing with an extra surge of confidence because Faber and Faber was beckoning?

I was buoyed up and charged up and at the same time had a powerful will to deliver. Charles Monteith's letter picked out 'Death of a Naturalist' and 'Digging' as the poems that took his fancy, so that encouraged me to concentrate on subjects and settings around Mossbawn. And once I opened those channels, I got the surge, definitely.

Was it obvious from the beginning that 'Digging' would have to be the first poem in the book?

It was the first poem in the manuscript I sent to Dolmen and, from the moment I wrote it in August 1964, I knew it was a strength-giver. Where else could it be placed? It decided its position for itself.

Now that it's so famous, I should also ask if you remember how the gun/pen image occurred to you. And ask you too if there was any political significance in the fact that images of 'gun-barrel', 'bullet', 'armoury', 'salvo', 'pottery bombs' and so on appear in various pre-Troubles poems.

[...] In the case of the pen 'between my finger and my thumb', 'snug as a gun', and all the rest of it, I was responding to an entirely phonetic prompt, a kind of sonic chain dictated by the inner ear. It's the connection between the 'uh' sounds in 'thumb' and 'snug' and 'gun' that are the heart of the poetic matter rather than any sociological [end of page 82] or literary formation.

You mentioned earlier that the poem will come more quickly if there is a form. Would you be offended to be called a formalist?

I wouldn't be offended but I think it would be a mistake. 'Formalist' to me sounds like a kind of doctrinaire position. I totally believe in form; but quite often, when people use the term, they mean shape rather than form. There's the sonnet shape, fair enough, but it's not just a matter of rhyming the eight lines and the other six; they happen to be set one on top of each other like two boxes, but they're more like a torso and pelvis. There has to be a little bit of muscle movement, it has to be alive in some sort of way. A moving poem doesn't just mean that it touches you, it means it has to move itself along as a going linguistic concern. Form is not like a pastry cutter—the dough has to move and discover its own shape. I love to feel that my own voice is on track; that can happen within a metrical shape where you're stepping out to a set tune or it can happen in a less regulated way within a free shape.

The poem I began with as a writer, 'Digging', was truer to my phonetic grunting from south Derry than to any kind of iambic correctness from the books. Every writer lives between the vernacular given—whether it be the vernacular of Oxford or of the Caribbean—and some received idiom from the tradition.

—Dennis O'Driscoll, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (London: Faber and Faber, 2009)

Vocabulary

diction

rhythm

cadence

consonance

assonance

imagery

movement

trajectory 

metaphor

family

tradition 

Sample Student Responses to Seamus Heaney's "Digging"

Response 1::

Reference

Reference

Heaney, Seamus. “Digging.” Selected Poems 1966–1987. New York: Noonday Press, 1995. 3–4. Print.

O'Driscoll, Dennis. Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney. London: Faber and Faber, 2009. Print.

Further Reading

Heaney, Seamus. Selected Poems 1966–1987. New York: Noonday Press, 1995. Print.

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Last updated April 17, 2017