Analyse af 'Digging' af Seamus Heaney

Seamus Justin Heaney (born 13 April 1939) is an Irish poet, writer and lecturer who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. In 1966, Seamus Heaney published his first collection, called “Death of a Naturalist”. The first poem of the collection; “Death of a Naturalist” is, called “Digging” – and that is the poem I am going to analyze.

“Digging”

By Seamus Heaney (1966)

Digging is a free verse poem with nine stanzas and two couplets with the themes; changing, nature, rebelliousness, and follow in footsteps. Despite, that there is no really rhyme scheme, though it has some rhymes as: “thumb” and “gun”; “sound”, “ground” and “down”. Besides, we can see the poem is written in first person narrative: “Between my finger and my thumb”. Seeing the title without reading the poem creates curious questions of guessing why he named the poem “Digging”. However the “Digging” is connected to the three mentioned generations in the poem – his father dug up potatoes, his grandfather dug turf and Seamus Heaney digging up his own memory. Seamus makes use of a change of tense every time he changes description of his father, grandfather and himself. From the second stanza to the fourth he is writing in present, from the sixth stanza to eighth he is writing in past, in the last stanza (stanza nine) he is writing in the perfect. In the first stanza we are being introduced for Seamus’ pen - he even writes it fits “snug as a gun”. History shows that the power of a gun is equal to the power of a pen - the written word can be as much powerful as a gun – that is why he uses the pen as a comparison to the gun. In the second stanza Seamus is writing about, hearing the sound of his father digging, he finishes the stanza by writing: “My father, digging. I look down”. It continues the writing in the third and fourth stanza about how his father exercised his work. “Bends low, comes up twenty years away” tells us how, his father has been working in the same way for twenty years – he continues writing his working method until the sixth stanza. In the sixth stanza Seamus writes about his grandfather who was a digger too. He tells us, that he once carried milk for his grandfather and experienced how he worked – he gives us a very vivid description which affects our listen and smell of sense of his work by writing: “The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap”. He finishes his memories from his father and grandfather in the ninth stanza by writing: “But I’ve no spade to follow men like them”. It tells us, that he never had any intentions to become digger like them, and his future lies in writing. In the last stanza Seamus repeats the introductory stanza: “Between my finger and my thumb. The squat pen rests. I’ll dig with it”. Now the gun is replaced by: “I’ll dig with it” – now the image of the pen as a gun is no longer, and the pen has got a metaphorical role as a spade, he uses to dig up his own memory with.