“When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: My father, digging. I look down” – The role of soil in Seamus Heaney’s “Digging” #People4Soil

“Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.”

The unexpected passing of Seamus Heaney in August 2013 stung the nation and Irish diaspora into a sad and silent appreciation of his works. Today marks what would have been his 78th birthday.

Born in the same year as Yeats died and sharing a birthday with Beckett, Heaney was part of a generation of poets, along with Eavan Boland, Paul Muldoon and Thomas Kinsella, that succeeded in casting off the shadow of Ireland’s national poet and forging their own dialogue on Ireland identity.

They faced the same threat as the group of footballers that followed the Arsenal’s 2004 invincible team of Henry, Bergkamp, Pires and Ljungberg. A great team of leaders setting new precedents in the historical but cramped Highbury stadium, the new team moved to a larger venue. However they failed to match the heights of their predecessors. Now, the explicit and animated post-match criticisms on Arsenal TV is more entertaining than their football.

The acknowledged success of artists from the revivalist movement from the turn of the 20th century, during a time when Ireland faced political turbulence and a cultural effervescence, threatened the artistic freedom of the next generation of talented writers. Instead of becoming a cheap pastiche, artistic conversations and grappling moved internal and domestic.

From public to private

While Yeats’ writings intimated the characteristics, history and culture of the real and ideal Ireland, Heaney busied himself with the heady business of analysis. His celebrated collection, Death of  a Naturalist (1966) with poems like “Digging” optimizes Heaney as a poet, living through the Troubles, grappling with his role in the present by delving into an understanding of a private and national past.

 The private and local musings is peppered with harsh vocabulary depicting the tough hardship of working the land; his father’s “straining rump”, “coarse boot” and levered inside knee and his grandfather “heaving sods, Over his shoulder, going down and down.”

It takes a toll and bears a sacrifice on those willing to engage in such an inherited practice. The appreciation of the “cool hardness in our hands” of newly found potatoes demonstrates that only the initiated -those with a connection to the soil- can truly understand the wealth it holds.

 There is  a depth to this allegory from the poet. There is the private exploration of his own identity along with that of a national history and tradition. “Through living roots awaken in my head” sparks a realization in the speaker of place, context and the uncompromising burden of tradition.

On top of that, the tradition and craft of digging, sowing and creating is heavily linked to his own artistic endeavors.

Across the Atlantic, Ezra Pound had faced such a dilemma moving on from Walt Whitman in his poem, “A Pact,” seeing him as the pig-headed father – hardly  complimentary. Pound was forced to acknowledge that his predecessor “broke the wood” before noting, “Now a time for carving.” A time not to break from the past but to develop something new from it.

Heaney too recognized the need to make sense and pay homage to the ethics and techniques of past writers while also moving on. For better or worse he does not fit their mould and his tools differ. “But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.” It is the pen, “snug as a gun” – that loaded image he presents us with at the start – will do his digging.

See also: Grounding Irish Identity. Mother Ireland and Mother Nature

See also: Video: Helen Kelly “To forget how to dig the earth, to tend the soil is to forget ourselves.”

[x_author title=”About the Author”]