Digging

Heaney’s poem opens with a clear indication of time; the speaker’s weapon is introduced before his father, grandfather, or the idea of inheritance: “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests; snug as a gun” (Lines 1-2). “Digging” is, in essence, a poem about tools, and as the speaker moves through layers of memory in the poem, “digging” his way down his family line, Heaney uses those tools to establish a clear chain of inheritance, as well as to illustrate the effects the passage of time have on that inheritance. While the poem is firmly rooted in a particular place, Northern Ireland, the scene of the poem is in flux, moving backwards and forwards in time in a quintessentially Postmodern stream-of-consciousness style.

The speaker’s pen is like a “gun” (Line 2) in that he plans to use it as a weaponized tool. The pen sits in the writer’s hand between finger and thumb, a manner reminiscent of finger-to-trigger placement on a firearm. The use of the “gun” as the first image of the poem is multi-faceted and speaks both to the tensely-coiled Northern Irish Conflict and the violence of the late-20th century in general, as well as to the speaker’s personal intentions. By transferring the power of the “gun” to the writer’s pen, Heaney implies a certain violent, tense nature to the work the writer is performing. Digging into the past is violent and painful, and in this poem, the exploration begins with “a clean rasping sound / When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: / My father, digging. I look down” (Lines 3-5). At this point, the poem meets with another tool, purposefully set aside from the “pen” and the “gun” that are introduced in the present at the beginning of the poem: the spade.

The speaker’s father appears in toil, introduced first by “a clean rasping sound” (Line 3), which evokes a sense of danger or unrest. The rasp of the shovel is, in effect, also functioning on a secondary level as a rasping breath or a “death rattle,” the dying breaths of an era that exists more firmly in the past than in the speaker’s present. The father’s “straining rump among the flowerbeds / Bends low, comes up twenty years away” (Lines 6-7) and the speaker takes his first step back in time, “digging” and descending through the first layer of memory. As Heaney digs in, so too does the poem’s attention to sound. An onomatopoeic (a word that sounds like what it is named) effect is set right from the beginning by the use of repetitive internal and end rhymes: “thumb” (Line 1), “snug” (Line 2), and “gun” (Line 2) meld with “sound” (Line 3), “ground” (Line 4), and “down” (Line 5). The short, staccato words, which feature long vowel sounds, recreate the deep, reverberating thud of a shovel plunging into the ground, and the following, lengthy “rasping sound” (Line 3) is the echoing scrape of metal.

In the fourth paragraph, the speaker joins in the action, becoming lost in the memory as an active participant: “He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep / To scatter new potatoes that we picked, / Loving their cool hardness in our hands” (Lines 12-14). At this point, directly at the poem’s center, is the only use of collective personal pronouns in the poem. Throughout the majority of the poem’s text, the speaker writes in the first person “I” or provides a description of others. The “we” and “our” are unclear pronouns; although we know the speaker is there, working with his father, it is unclear whether or not there are other people present as part of the collective. At the heart of Heaney’s “Digging,” there is a sense of the speaker’s respect, love, and even nostalgia for the domestic labor he performed alongside his father. The speaker’s collective “love” for the “cool hardness in our hands” (Line 14) speaks to a desire to work as his father did, to inherit the toil of the Earth, but the addition of the collective personal pronoun, “our,” implies that the speaker feels a sense of disconnection from the past, his father, and the work itself. The speaker is separate from the past, but he still longs for the familial bonds present during that time.

From there, Heaney transitions to the second layer of memory by way of a couplet: “By God, the old man could handle a spade. / Just like his old man” (Lines 15-16). The grandfather’s appearance in the poem lengthens the chain of inheritance, clarifying that the work, the labor of the speaker’s past, was not a one-off scene. It was a continuous cycle of “Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods…going down and down / For the good turf. Digging” (Lines 22-24). The work passes from father to son, on and on, until we return to the speaker in the present. Despite the speaker’s attraction and attachment to “The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap / Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge” (Lines 25-26), he concludes his reverie with a sharp definitive: “I’ve no spade to follow men like them” (Line 28). It is with calculated intention, not an innate desire for separation, that the speaker pulls away from the inheritance of the past, from his father and grandfather, to the harsh violence of the present, the “gun” (Line 2) and the educated, mental labor of the future, “the pen” (Lines 2, 30). Although he is not armed with a spade, “The squat pen rests” (Line 30), and with it, he will “dig” (Line 31).