Written in 1966, Seamus Heaney’s “Digging” is a recollection of fond memories with his family. Throughout the poem, Heaney honors the hardworking complexion of both his father and grandfather who, after Ireland’s struggle with food and fuel, took up the agricultural business to farm potatoes and dig for peat. Heaney provides a tunnel into his own life and past as he creates a major theme of tradition and customs as well as search for self. However, as seen in the beginning and end, Heaney strayed from the traditional path of farming that his family had set for him. From the very beginning of “Digging”, Heaney is forced to attend to his identity crisis as he, in order to justify his poetry, reflects upon family memories. “Digging”, Seamus Heaney justifies his identity as a poet, his distancing from the family tradition of agriculture, and honor his fathers all through devices such as imagery, alliteration, and metaphors and similes.
By appealing to the reader’s sense of touch through imagery involving the poet’s family’s tradition, Heaney is able to help the reader understand the difficulty in his departure from a craft he respects so dearly and begin his justification for why he has become a writer. Heaney appeals to the sense of touch before anything else in the poem as he writes that “Between my finger and thumb/The squat pen rests; snug as a gun” (line 1 and 2) causing the reader to imagine what it feels like holding a gun. This comparison allows the reader to physically feel the power in Heaney’s new vocation of writing, although the reader might’ve never held a gun before. Heaney then describes the “cool hardness” (line 14) of the potatoes he helped to pick as a kid with his family. Although the reader once again has most likely never picked potatoes before, this imagery allows the reader to feel the power of his family’s agricultural tradition. Finally, Heaney speaks of the “curt cuts” (line 26) that his grandfather once made when he cut turf. Through all this visual imagery, Heaney makes the reader feel present in his memories which in turn allows the reader to understand Heaney’s difficulty with leaving this ongoing family tradition.
By appealing to the reader’s sense of hearing through the use of alliteration in the body of Heaney’s poem enables him to stress the difficulty of the agricultural business and allow the reader to understand his forefathers’ job, therefore showing the reader his pain in leaving the tradition behind. Another sense that Heaney appeals to is the sense of hearing. Heaney describes how he hears “a clean rasping sound” (line 3) and the “spade [dig] into gravelly ground” (line 4). This alliteration of s’s and hard g’s in these two lines allow the reader to hear the difficulty Heaney’s father had shoveling the “gravelly ground”. Later on, Heaney uses the hard ck sound in “nicking” and the contrasts soft c in “slicing” (both line 22) to once again present the job difficulty his grandfather faced. Finally, Heaney uses the s’s in “squelch” and “slap” (both line 25) to inform the reader of the sound of “soggy peat” (line 26). All three of the actions that involve the sense of sound communicates to the reader the details of his forefather’s job and the difficulty that came with it, consequently, helping the reader understand the difficulty in leaving such a honored job. The difficulty in the craft and his forefathers’ skills with it have left a positive impact on him which he intends to now dig in his own way.
By “Digging” being founded on a metaphor and having similes throughout the body of the poem, Heaney is able to justify his departure from his family’s agricultural business, while being able to take up the pen and still honor it. The integrity of “Digging” is based off of the pen/spade metaphor. As mentioned earlier, Heaney seemed to have had a hard time breaking away from the family tradition of digging that was passed down to him and trying to justify his vocation to writing instead. This is apparent when he writes about the cutting of “living roots that awaken in my head” (Line 27). Through the pen/spade metaphor, Heaney proposes that he can continue digging like his forefathers, but with a pen in order to cut different, more poetic roots. Heaney believes that the poet is able to take up a more metaphorical spade and at the same time continue the cultural labor and hard work complex that his forefathers had created. The founding metaphor of the pen/spade justifies Heaney’s departure from the business while being able to honor it despite having “no spade to follow men like them” (line 28), he has a pen in his hand and he will “dig with it” (line 31). Heaney also incorporates similes throughout the body of his essay that contribute to his justification for becoming a writer. The same simile that served as imagery in lines 1 and 2 that was addressed earlier, has a multitude of purposes. One of those being to serve the sense of touch and another being that it’s an indicator to the amount of power that being a writer comes with and that being a reason for him coming to be a writer. This simile of the pen/gun backs the struggle Heaney has between choosing to write or farm. Heaney repeats this simile in the end, however this time the gun has been removed from the simile. This furthers Heaney’s choice to depart from the history of his family and use the pen as a different type of spade.
Overall, “Digging” is a poem that informs the reader of Heaney’s struggle with leaving behind the craftsmanship that his forefathers have shown him, honoring his family’s past, and trading in the spade for a different type of spade in order to explore his own way of digging. He calls upon the memories he had with his grandfather and father in order to illustrate the traditional work of his family to the reader and allow them to coexist in those memories which, consequently, allow them to feel and understand his tough struggle with distancing himself from a tradition he takes pride in. Although this new spade cannot physically dig, he can culturally “dig” with his writings as a poet as his grandfather and father once did.