"Digging" Through This Poem

On the surface, it would appear that Seamus Heaney's poem "Digging" is a mere description of his father digging in the backyard, and his subsequent musings concerning his father's ability to wield a spade. However, "Digging" is much more than an average poem. To begin with, it was Heaney's first poem in his first published book, and for reasons to be explained later, it was a just reflection of Heaney's poem for years to come: simple in form, commonplace in imagery, yet complex in meaning.

The form for this poem is rather unremarkable - a handful of rhymes, primarily in the beginning of "Digging", as if to draw the reader into the image. The remaining lines in the poem are punctuated by long vowel sounds and more than a few instances of consonance: "spade sinks...gravelly ground", "out tall tops", "curt cuts", etc. Heaney also uses repetition to emphasize the image of the "squat pen", but he introduces a new perspective to this mundane image by creating the pen-spade metaphor in the final line, to be discussed in greater depth later. Although lines 15-16 create a slight shift in scene, the true turn of the poem does not occur until line 28: "But I've no spade to follow men like them." It is here that Heaney finally reveals he cannot identify with his family's former profession; at least, he cannot go about digging in the same manner as they did.

Heaney's failure to identify with this agrarian lifestyle began in childhood in Northern Ireland. His father owned a farm, but his true passion was for cattle-dealing; on the other hand, his mother and all her relatives worked in an industrial environment (a local linen mill). This conflict, so early in Heaney's life, between the old ways and the new resulted in his failure to belong to either group. Adding to the widening rift between Heaney's parents' professions and his life was his schooling. He received a scholarship to go to boarding school when he was 12, and these gifts of language and education only further isolated him from his roots. This sentiment of distance is captured perfectly in "Digging."

In this poem, Heaney sees his father digging in the garden, doing the same thing his father did, and probably what his father did before him: farming, digging, working the land. His awe for his paternal figures is clear, and yet it is tinged with longing: he wishes to carry on the family tradition. However, the clashing worlds in which he lives - the rural farmland of agrarian Ireland and the gleaming halls of academia - prevent him from taking up the family mantle. Heaney can dig to his heart's desire, but he cannot find his roots, because the privilege of learning has removed them forever. Thus, to fulfill his inner desires to continue the long line of Heaney workingmen, he seeks some way to combine the best of both worlds. It is in search of this that Heaney develops his characteristic "chiasma".

The term "chiasma" in a literary sense refers to the crossing of themes in a work of literature. For much of his poetry, Heaney uses this technique better than anyone ever has. In "Digging", the crossing over occurs in the two concrete images, the pen and the spade. Heaney first gives us an image of the "squat pen", and then goes on to describe his father's ability to wield a spade - implying that his working-man father used his spade as his preferred tool of choice, as opposed to the pen of the intellectual Seamus, creating a spade-as-a-pen metaphor. However, at the conclusion of the poem, Heaney reverses the metaphor. Now, the pen is his chosen tool to continue his family's historic and time-honored legacy of the working man, as he uses it to "dig": a pen-as-a-spade metaphor. Thus, the two objects cross metaphorical roles, each complementing the other with such adroitness that one could describe it as beautiful.

From a simple story of a man digging comes wave after wave of complex emotions: the burden of familial duty, a failure to identify with one's own people, and the importance of cultivation, whether concretely or abstractly. Through "Digging", Seamus Heaney finds something even better than his original roots: a hybrid plant blending the worlds of his past and his present, ripe for success in his future. (727)