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The Monday Poem
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Monday Poem - 'Digging' by Seamus Heaney - 30/1/2017
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Thanks for sharing! I like this poem a lot
Wonderful poem, such a great example of time and place.
Thanks, I could listen to Heaney reading all day.
Alannah, thanks for the video link! I really enjoyed it, could really feel his words. My grandfather was an amazing gardener, this poem brought me close to him again in my mind. Thanks. :)
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The mention of the gun at the beginning set me on edge (I live in the land of guns) but then shifted to gardening and ancestors.Can anyone give me some insight on the gun simile?
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I love this poem -- good choice Alannah!
Very different poem for me...I like it!
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Like Joan, I was a little puzzled by the gun reference though. The way it was used seem to be setting up something violent or at the very least contentious, but the poem itself is almost slightly wistful, this memory of his forbears who were experts in their simple but vital tasks with the potatoes and turf.
Your explanation of the gun reference is as good as any I can come up with, but it still strikes me as a bit odd. I wonder if the poems before or after it in the original collection related in some way?
I like the suggestion in the final line - that he will unearth possibly vital life-giving things akin to these potatoes and turf with his writing, his own kind of "digging." That his writing is a sort of important work of its own maybe.
Thanks for posting Alannah, and sorry to respond so late. I wanted to spend time with the poem before responding.
Re the gun, I've always read this to mean that those of Heaney's generation had to choose whether or not to be involved in the violence relating to the move for a United Ireland, and that several people he knew chose that route, but that he has chosen the route of writing instead.
Your comments about the gun made me wonder if he was implying that his pen has somehow replaced the gun as a weapon. The previous generation had used guns to advance their world view but he will use a pen.Can anyone tell me how Heaney viewed the Irish struggle for independence?
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Thanks Gill! It makes sense that this is a reference to the violence of that struggle.
I like your and Joan's interpretations. Maybe it also has to do with the dangerousness of writing in this environment, the strong possibility of doing violence with your pen even accidentally, the fear of being co-opted by one side or the other for propaganda?
In that article you linked Gill, it seems that danger was ever-forward in Heaney's mind. He was trying very hard not to stoke the violence, but in the precariousness of the situation, he had to be very cautious of every word he wrote. In those circumstances, the pen could feel very much like a gun, like something dangerous.
The oddest thing for me is that the gun reference seems to have very little to do with the rest of the poem. But in the whole book of poems it was orginally published in, with repeated concerns and motifs, it probably felt a lot more natural. I do often find it difficult to make full sense of individual poems out of the context they originally belonged to.
the squat pen seems to have morphed through the poem from gun to tool for digging...which brings us back to the WWI vets putting away their weapons and taking up farm tools.
This discussion really helped me, thanks.
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Good point! A pen can be used for both purposes, for inciting violence and for building/useful work.
Gill wrote: "And this is good in general about SH also:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/36..."
Thank you for those, I only knew of his Beowulf translation. The audio version is one of my prize possessions but I hadn't read his poetry. I grew up around belligerent, rabidly proud Irish-American cousins, which turned me off to anything Celtic for years. I guess its time to let that go.
Nancy, I never knew about the 1880 issue.
I see that was written to accompany a BBC series; did you watch it?
Joan wrote: "Your comments about the gun made me wonder if he was implying that his pen has somehow replaced the gun as a weapon. The previous generation had used guns to advance their world view but he will us..."This is how I took it, that he is fighting through his writing.
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.