The Spade, The Pen and The Gun: 'Digging' through the Past with Seamus Heaney

In this week's episode of “Beyond the Verse,” the official podcast of PoemAnalysis.com and Poetry+, Joe and Maiya explore the poem 'Digging' by Seamus Heaney, a poem from one of the most revered Irish poets of all time.

They discuss 'Digging' (1966), exploring not only the cultural inheritances imbued in the poem, but the physical manifestations of labour, as well as how nature and literature interact in the poem. Joe and Maiya discuss Heaney's literary forefathers and incredible legacy in both the Irish and English canon.

Get PDFs on 'Digging' exclusive to Poetry+ users:

• Full PDF Guide
• Poetry Snapshot PDF

For more information on Heaney and his work, check out poemanaylsis.com, where you can find a huge selection of analysed poems, with PDFs to aid, and explorations in our extensive PDF Learning Library - see our Seamus Heaney PDF Guide.

Plus, stay tuned to get some recommendations for alternate poets that have been inspired by Heaney's work!

Tune in and Discover:

• Heaney's position in the canon and role in Irish poetic tradition
• Key themes throughout 'Digging' and the poet's other work
• Heaney's childhood and poetic influences
• The significance of the spade, the pen, and the gun

Transcript

The Spade, The Pen and The Gun: 'Digging' through the Past with Seamus Heaney (Transcript)

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Maiya: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to Beyond the Verse me, maiya, and my co host, Joe. This is a podcast on poetry brought to you by Poemanalysis.com and Poetry+, the home of poetry for readers, students, and teachers alike. Today, we're going to be discussing Digging by Seamus Heaney. Now, Joe, do you want to tell us a little bit about the themes that we'll be discussing today?

Joe: Thanks, maiya. Yeah, the poem is really remarkable, and I can't wait to get into it with you because it's just there's so much to discuss. Some of the key ideas we're going to be covering in today's episode include cultural inheritance, different forms of labor, and how nature impacts the literary world.

Now, In order to understand this poem, it's important to go back to the beginning. Many of our listeners will have heard of Seamus Heaney, some of them will be familiar, some of them won't be familiar. So for those who aren't, Seamus Heaney was an Irish poet, grew up in one of the northern counties, County Derry.

He was the eldest of nine children, I believe, certainly had a very large [00:01:00] family, very rural upbringing, farming family, grew up in the 1940s, he was born in 1939, and That context is going to prove to be really significant when we look at this poem. Where Seamus Heaney comes from is vital if you want to understand where Seamus Heaney went as a poet and the kind of things that, that held his poetic interest throughout his career.

So that's where Seamus Heaney comes from in sort of very broad terms as a young writer, a young person growing up in Ireland. Where are we when this poem gets released? Jump forward to 1966. Maiya, do you want to tell us a little bit about that?

Maiya: Absolutely. So, In 1966, When Digging is published, it is in his first collection, Death of a Naturalist. He's around 27 years old, he's graduated with a first class honours in English from university, he's part of the Belfast Group, which is a collection of writers in Ireland, he's been part of that group for around three years, so he's surrounded by people who are also writing and, actively engaging in that literary scene. Death of a Naturalist, as a [00:02:00] collection, as a first collection for a poet, was catapulted into the stratosphere. It made him almost immediately famous within the literary world and I think Digging stands as a testament to the intentions that he sets with this collection.

Joe: It catapulted him to overnight literary success and it remains one of the most enduringly powerful collections of the entire 20th century. Interestingly, the way you've described Heaney is, is absolutely accurate at that moment in time, 

he seems in many ways to be already establishing himself as part of the Irish cultural community, surrounded by other writers, Michael Longley, , Derek Mahon, to name a couple, who went on to have enormous success like him. But the collection is interesting because it's really rooted in his childhood.

It's looking back at a time before he met these people, before he was immersed in Irish cultural life. It's a poem almost entirely concerned with rural affairs. , the Irish landscape of his youth in County Derry, farming life, his relationship with his parents, and [00:03:00] indeed his grandparents, which is one of the key themes of the poem.

of this poem that we're going to talk about. So it's really important to remember that while the poem comes out of a moment of enormous collaborative effort with other poets,

the things he's actually interested in within the collection are related to a time before he ever knew these people, before he was ever concerned with the world of poetry. A lot of them take place in an imagined or remembered childhood. Fairly difficult childhood. He lost his brother when he was quite young.

His brother was killed in a car accident and that comes through in the poem Midterm Break. Other poems, like Follower, are very concerned with the . The act of farming, a relationship with his father, similar to this poem, but you're absolutely right in what you say about the significance of this collection at the time.

It's very, very rare that a poet comes into the world kind of almost fully formed, and to write a first collection that goes on to define your career in many ways, which is no insult to what happened afterwards, it's just that's how good this collection was. It's unbelievable. 

Maiya: I think, that Death of a Naturalist, [00:04:00] with all the poems that it includes with that natural theming, it's so often viewed as an exploration of the death of innocence. And I think throughout, digging specifically throughout the rest of the poems in the collection, You really do see a tying in of how nature and innocence interplay with one another. And his choice to stray away from the generational labour of his father, of his grandfather, stands also to reason that that is the death of his innocence as a child. He is making his own path, he's making his own way forward. 

Joe: I completely agree, Myron. I mean, let's dive into the poem itself and we're going to start with the title digging, this sort of mysterious, isolated word. Tell us about that. , what significance does that have within the poem?

Maiya: as you've already mentioned, digging was critical to childhood. His childhood. father, his grandfather were from the laboring classes. And in this poem, [00:05:00] you can see three types of digging specifically. You see the father figure in the poem digging potatoes for a living. You see the grandfather figure digging through peat for fuel. And you see the speaker, the poet digging internally, digging through his mind to find the right words. 

Joe: I think that final one in particular, it really comes through for me. That sense that this is a poem about self interrogation, but also where Seamus Heaney fits into the landscape that he is inheriting. Symbolic association with Ireland and potatoes I think can't be ignored.

I'm sure most of our listeners will be aware, but those who weren't, the potato famine is a tragedy associated with the country of Ireland. The famine was absolutely devastating for Ireland in terms of the death that it caused, the misery it caused on those who survived, and the many, many hundreds of thousands of people who emigrated. And one of the reasons that the Irish diaspora is so strong throughout the world is because hundreds of thousands of people left the country of Ireland because they couldn't feed themselves or their families.

So it had this completely transformative effect on the country because of the failure of the [00:06:00] potato crop. Now, The significance of his father growing potatoes, therefore, is that this is somebody from Heaney's immediate familial past who is engaging in activity related to the symbolic fabric of the nation.

So Heaney has this kind of dual inheritance he's inheriting the trade from his father in terms of being a rural farmer. Now, ultimately, he doesn't go on to be a farmer himself, and we'll talk about that sense of dislocation later, but he's also inheriting the symbolic weight of the country of Ireland as represented by the crop that made the , country famous.

Now, one more thing, form of digging, you mentioned three already that I think are really interesting. I think, linked to the famine, we have to talk about the significance of digging with regard to famine roads. . One of the ways in which the rulers of Ireland, who were the English at the time, attempted to deal with the famine was by basically encouraging people to dig what have become known as famine roads in exchange for money and food. A lot of these roads ended up leading to nowhere.

So you have this awful situation in which people who were already starving were being made to dig roads with no destination in mind. If any of [00:07:00] you listeners ever are there, you can go and visit some of these famine roads. In addition to those three sort of symbolic interpretations of digging that we've mentioned, the Famine Road is a really important one because it talks about that sense of futility with regard to digging, that sense of this road that leads to nowhere.

And those things are sort of blurred within the context of this poem. It's never exactly clear which, if any, individually Heaney is engaging with. He's talking about all of them at once, they're all informing his poetic outlook, and Right from the title we get this sense of a poem that is incredibly dense and incredibly varied in its outlook.

Maiya: And it's a fascinating layering to explore the poem that has so many kind of context clues. And for you, Joe, How do you think that sense of futility frames this poem in terms of being a first collection, in terms of Heaney being a kind of Irish poet that's following someone like Yeats?

Joe: It's a brilliant question, and one that I imagine Heaney himself would have asked himself a lot. For those readers and listeners who aren't aware, [00:08:00] WB Yeats dominates Irish literary life for the entire 20th century, even up to this day. , I I did a master's in Irish literature in Ireland and one of my modules was Irish poetry after Yeats.

So there is very much an inflection point. There is poetry before Yeats and there's poetry afterwards. 

So writing back against that literary past that includes Yeats and includes, the Irish history that I've already mentioned, I think to have a first collection, which obviously is meant to be a poet's breakout moment, to be. Sort of paying homage to the past and looking back and appreciating the fact that in order to move forwards You have to understand where you come from. I think it's a nice way of he needs to doff his cap to those people who've come before but as we've said Unlike those famine roads I've mentioned which might inform some of the the symbolic significance of digging this collection and this poem in particular I think are actually relatively affirmative.

It's relatively bold in its assessment of Heaney's own career. It's right at the beginning of his career, but already, there is a sense here that this is a poet who is going places, who is moving forward with purpose, which obviously stands in stark contrast to those famine [00:09:00] roads that I mentioned. 

Maiya: For a poem like this, it's incredibly important to note how much history plays into it. This poem was published, preceding The Troubles in Ireland. And I always find that it's very hard to divorce poems from their context in a lot of ways. And I don't doubt for a second that with this poem there was an atmosphere of violence that was brewing at the time. And to open this poem with the lines, Between my finger and my thumb, the squat pen rests snug as a gun. is an incredibly powerful opening., 

Joe: For listeners who aren't aware, The Troubles refers to a prolonged period, several decades of sectarian violence, largely rooted in Northern Ireland, but also spilling out into the Republic of Ireland and also other parts of the UK.

largely along sectarian lines. , it's a slight oversimplification, but broadly speaking between Catholics and Protestants. Now Heaney was a Northern Irish Catholic so as a Catholic in Northern Ireland and a member of that minority group, Heaney didn't have loads of contact with Protestants. And [00:10:00] again, there isn't, you know, it's an interesting story just to illustrate how divisive society was at the time, which was when Heaney joined the Belfast group in 1963 and he met fellow poets, including people like Michael Longley, Heaney later remarked that this was the first Protestant that he'd ever really got to know as a person.

Now again, he was, I think, in his mid twenties at the time, 23 years old, living. A mere matter of miles from Protestant families and kids of his own age. The fact that he hadn't really got to know any of them is a real sign of how divided this place was, even before violence broke out in the late 1960s.

So, the atmosphere that you've mentioned of violence is hugely important, and goes on to interact and intersect with Heaney's career for the next 30 years or more. . , I think we've got to talk about the way the gun is actually described. So it's described using the word snug. Now, for many people, snug will have connotations of warmth and, crucially, of familiarity. There is a sense here that the gun, a representation of violence, is something that is normal, something that is familiar to the poet.

And again, many, many young men of [00:11:00] Heaney's age, would go on to be involved in the armed struggle and the armed conflict.

We're going to talk a lot about the pen over the course of today, and I'd love to get your thoughts on this, maiya. What is the significance of placing the pen so front and centre in this poem? What is Heaney trying to say about his role as a poet, perhaps in relationship to Those around him 

Maiya: I mean, ultimately, throughout this poem, the pen is represented as a choice, in those two opening lines, in that first stanza, the pen is a replacement for the gun, the comfort, although within that violence that is very evident through the poem. The pen stands as a kind of monument to an alternate way. The pen not only replaces the gun but it also later in the poem replaces the shovel. This is a moment in which Heaney is declaring that he is choosing the path of poet. The speaker is choosing the path of non violence of non labor. I think the, the road that leads to [00:12:00] nowhere is a particularly poignant kind of motif to carry through this poem because actually, as you mentioned earlier, Heaney's almost using the pen to write his way out of this. He's using it as a touchpoint of creation, not of destruction. If you take out the gun imagery from that, are creating a hugely comforting sense that Heaney is familiar with, understands the pen, is deeply entwined with who the speaker is as a person, and that, I think, carries through the whole poem.

Joe: Yeah, I completely agree and I'm just thinking as you were saying that talking about the road that leads to nowhere given that he was Massively different in his career choice to anybody in his family that had come before him obviously he comes from a family of farming going back several generations.

This is a huge difference that he's making. So in many ways that idea of the road that leads to nowhere is, the road that he's on because it's not somewhere that anyone he knows or he is familiar with has ever [00:13:00] been before. So it might seem as though it leads to nowhere but in fact it's just a representation of Heaney carving his own journey that was incredibly different to anyone in his family before him.

Maiya: I know we spoke about this before the podcast, but actually the position of the speaker in the poem is in a room, in front of a window, watching his father dig from the outside. There is not just a mental separation 

there is a physical separation where you understand that the speaker throughout their childhood was almost not permitted access to what the generations before them were, you know, the confines of that room in this poem feel very safe.

Joe: No, definitely. I mean, that symbol of looking through the glass, , not only his father, but people like his father, there's no sense of gradation here. Heaney's career is a complete 360.

It's a complete diversion from anything his father or his grandfather had ever done with their lives. He has a kind of liminal relationship with his own childhood, because it's a place that he [00:14:00] remembers, he can see it, and yet there is a barrier between him.

The glass of the window represents that barrier, not only between him and his own childhood, which is normal for lots of people, we don't, we can't go back to our own childhood, but also between him and his family history. He will never be plow the fields, he will never dig in the garden in the same way that they did and that window represents that barrier that cannot be passed through



Maiya: is ultimately a mediation, right? It mediates on what it means to separate yourself from a cultural inheritance, for sure. However, I must say in certain readings of this poem by other critics, it's presented as a poem that is a little bit more abstracted. It doesn't really have, , a concrete feeling for me. The exact opposite. I absolutely feel as if this poem has a sense of presence and physicality that goes far beyond just a daydream or a mediation. This can be seen throughout the poem in those very physical forms of [00:15:00] labor. 

Joe: I'd just like to touch on the way those family members are described in the poem itself. So there's a very short stanza, By God, the old man could handle a spade, just like his old man. And those lines are referring to Heaney's father and Heaney's grandfather. And I think one of the things that's really interesting about them is neither one of them is named, neither one of them is distinguished.

They're both referred to as old man. And I think that's really interesting because it almost implies that nothing has changed between his father's generation and his grandfather's generation. They both do the same job, they both live in the same place, and one imagines that were Heaney to go back even further into his family tree, it would be a series of the old man, the old man.

What I think that really emphasizes is how big a shift Heaney's career is from his family tree. It's not the case that his grandfather was a farmer, his father worked in industry or in business, and Heaney becomes a poet. There is a stark divide between rural agrarian life [00:16:00] and the kind of life that Heaney would go on to lead.

Beginning with this collection, which was a life of establishment, a life of educational institutions, a life of award ceremonies, a life of enormous global renown. It's really interesting for me, that dislocation. 

And that tension really comes through for me in this poem, the way that he looks back at his father and his and sees different versions of the same person.

One of the things that I love about this poem is that Heaney doesn't pick sides. Heaney doesn't lessen the work of his father and his grandfather in order to elevate his own. It would have been very easy for him to talk about poetry as some kind of higher calling, or to diminish the work labors of his father and grandfather.

He doesn't. In many ways, as we've said already, the pen that functions as a direct replacement for the spade and a direct replacement for the gun, it is seen as no less of a tangible physical object of labor. And I love the way that he presents that. There is an absolute equivalency in this poem between his work as a poet, his work as a cultural figure, and the work of his [00:17:00] father and his grandfather.

Maiya: I think that word squat that is introduced in the second line of this poem is one to really pick up on, specifically for that point, you know, the squat pen. When you then look at the father and the grandfather figure, Heaney sees his father digging and he says, I look down till his straining rump among the flowerbeds bends low.

When he speaks of his grandfather, he says, He straightened up to drink the milk then fell to right away. There is a sense of burden and heaviness on each member of this family. Obviously, as you say, the separation from feeling that way as a poet, feeling the weight of history and legacy bearing down on you, As opposed to the very physical, manual labour and the weight of actually doing that work. Heaney draws a parallel between himself and his forefathers, but also makes it evidently clear that the roads in which they're going down completely dissect. I think to balance those two contrasts, It's a [00:18:00] fascinating thing in Heaney's work throughout Death of a Naturalist as well, when you look at innocence and experience being a pivotal juxtaposition throughout the collection, when you explore the generational carryovers, I think what Heaney is saying in that use of the word squat, is That he recognizes the weight that he has to carry through history by making a decision to not follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather.



Joe: Now, as many of our listeners will already know, we have a plethora of poetic resources on our website at Poemanalysis.com. Now, Poetry+ subscribers can get those materials without seeing a single ad on the site. So if you want that premium ad free experience, sign up for a Poetry+ subscription at permanarsis.

com now. There are literally thousands of resources available and you can get them all at the [00:19:00] click of a button. 

Maiya: The one thing that I'd say about Heaney's work, this poem and his collections on the whole, is that you can't explore them without looking at the significance of nature. And the bog is one of the few recurring symbols throughout Heaney's work that holds such a major significance.

Now, I know Joe, you'd like to elaborate on this. So please tell us more.

Joe: Yeah, you're absolutely right, and bogs might seem to some of our listeners like a slightly odd thing to inspire a poem, but, my goodness, Heaney does a fabulous job of it. 

Now, the reason the bog is so significant, not only is it a, again, a nostalgic reminder of Heaney's childhood, where he grew up near bogs, but of course a bog is a really contested symbol in his poetry, because on the one hand we associate bogs with decay. With physical matter that is breaking down. But, certain things within Boggs are actually preserved.

So it's this really contested symbol between decay and decline on the one hand, and [00:20:00] preservation on the other. Now, one of the reasons I find this so fascinating is that so much of Heaney's poetry is a dialogue between his present moment and his former self. That really matters, because obviously as we grow and as we change and as we develop, especially as a young person like Heaney, going from this rural farming background we've spoken about to this, , urban, poetic environment, There is a huge amount that gets left by the wayside.

There is a process of renewal, a process of change, which is represented by the fact that the physical matter in the bog is continually being broken down. But occasionally, things come out of a bog that are fully formed. So, there is a very famous poem that Heaney writes just a few years later in his 1972 collection, Wintering Out, called The Tollund Man.

Now the Tollund Man, for listeners who aren't aware, was a set of human remains that were found in a bog in Denmark in 1950, and he and he saw them, they were on display, and it inspired a poem of his that engages in many of the same themes as this one, the idea that something can come from the past that can be rediscovered, and it can completely take a person back to their [00:21:00] own experiences of childhood, and even further back to explore where people come from.

So the bog is an incredibly important symbol for Heaney because it represents the way in which things change and occasionally the way we are confronted by the things that have not changed. Now, one of Seamus Heaney's contemporaries, a fellow Irish poet and critic by the name of Seamus Deane, said that when it comes to Heaney's poetry, 

what had been the material of his nostalgia becomes the material of prophecy. And I think that is never more pertinent than when Heaney is writing about the bog, because it's a symbol, on the one hand, of his own nostalgia for his own childhood, when he went to the bog and, like lots of children do, laughed at its smells and played in its undergrowth.

But actually, the way in which that functions as a prophetic symbol for his entire career, which, as a recurrent symbol for one of his children. The century's greatest poets now maiya. I'd love to hear what you'd have to say about that 

Maiya: I think throughout Heaney's work and specifically, as you said, through the poems that focus on the bog as a symbol, there is a [00:22:00] thread of respect and a questioning from Heaney as to whom owes that respect. As you say, kids used to play in the bog, make fun of it, but also as an adult, there is a reverence towards this landscape that holds memory and history, you know, good or bad. And it reminds me, there's a few of Heaney's poems I'd like to touch on briefly, you know. One being Bogland. In Bogland, Heaney has a line that always kind of rings true with me. The wet centre is bottomless.

He speaks to the bog as something that has so much history, it's untouchable. You cannot get to the bottom of it. And Heaney's work for, 40, 50 years of consistent creation used this bog as inspiration. He never got to the bottom of it and there are poets now who still use that and use Heaney's work as a jumping off point to explore history or culture or heritage. Strange Fruit is another one that crops up for me, and [00:23:00] especially looking at the Tollund man. , Strange Fruit, he looks at the exhumation of a girl's head, and he describes it as an exhumed gourd. He looks at that sense of respect, this girl's body is pulled out of the bog and then put on display for all to see. And that respect, or the disrespect of, in this case, of that girl's body, the exhumation of that girl's corpse, and using it as a display for people to walk through and pay little to no attention to, or using it as a cultural artifact without paying the necessary respect to it, is something I think Heaney plays with kind of throughout his collections, looking at owing yourself, or owing your history, or owing yourself to the past.

Joe: No, I completely agree. And I think again the symbol of the bog is this absolutely fascinating embodiment of the past as an active participant in the present and when Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize 1995, one of the things they celebrated [00:24:00] about his poetry in particular was its ability to exalt everyday miracles and the living past.

And again, these poems inspired by bodies that came out of the bog, these are bodies that were hundreds of years old. This sense that these almost living beings came out of the ground, I think is a really important way of looking at Heaney's poetry, which is that , the past is never truly gone in Heaney's poetry.

The past is continually coming to act within the present.

Maiya: And, you know, the people that worked in and around these bogs, That history doesn't fester and die within those spaces, it is continually brought to life. 

Joe: So just going back to one of the things we discussed in the first half of the podcast. The relationship between the pen, the spade, and the gun. Now we touched on these things a little bit as individual objects, but what relationship do they have to each other, and what relationships do they have to Heaney as an Irish poet?

Maiya: The spade, the pen and the gun are three symbols that represent Irish [00:25:00] history. The spade, as we've discussed, relates directly to the labouring class, the people that worked on The peat bogs, the people that dug the potatoes, that in itself, the agricultural center of Ireland, that is the spade. pen is looking forward to the future. The pen is the poet. It represents Heaney. It represents every artist that came out of those struggles and every artist that decided to take a different path and, and perhaps look at the more peaceful approach to that very troubled history. The gun obviously has a very significant impact on and interruption of Irish history. The gun in itself symbolizes the violence that Occurs throughout hundreds of years of Irish history, and they are presented in this poem absolutely as a choice. You cannot have all three. [00:26:00] How do you think Heaney I'd be really interested to know how you think Heaney tackles the difficulty of that choice.

Joe: I think you're absolutely right, and all three of those objects have resonance from the past and they have significance in the present for Heaney, I mean the pen also harks back to that Irish literature tradition that we've spoken about, I mean by the time that Heaney is writing this poem, there are two Irish winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

, just three years later Samuel Beckett would become the third and obviously later Heaney himself would become the fourth. So he is on the one hand inheriting that literary tradition as well as trying to take it forward himself. But I think one of the things I find fascinating about this is there is never a sense in this poem that Heaney rejected the spade.

There's never a sense that he was given the spade. a direct choice between the spade and the pen and that he rejected one in favor of the other. It's almost as though in his mind his decision was inevitable.

Now that could be simply a comment on the fact that he didn't want to be a farmer. It could simply be a comment on the fact that he had a dream of being a poet and he managed to achieve that dream. But it's [00:27:00] also a comment on the way that Irish life is changing.

Obviously in 1966 like many countries in Europe, uh, the Irish economy is changing enormously. It might simply be a case that Heaney is not only saying that this is not his future, but that this is not the future for his country, and actually that Irish life was changing, the way that people lived in Ireland was changing fundamentally in ways that it hadn't done in an economic sense for a very, very long time.

Maiya: And the stanza that absolutely speaks to that is the penultimate one. cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap of soggy peat. The curt cuts of an edge through living roots awaken in my head, but I've no spade to follow men like them. Lyrically, that stands out to me so much. I think you look at those first two lines, the cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap of soggy peat, that is unappealing.

The alliterative language, the assonance, the cloying sense that you get from the natural world, as opposed to when Heaney, [00:28:00] almost within that stanza, flicks to his lyrical, to his writer's pen, the curt cuts of an edge through living roots awaken in my head.

That's such a beautiful line to me. And I think within that stanza, he absolutely contrasts something that, as you say, was never given to him. I've no spade to follow men like them. He was never afforded that option, .

Joe: No, I completely agree, and again that sense of mould, again that links to the bog, there are symbols of decay, and I get the sense the more I read this poem that the This is not only about Heaney and his own childhood and his own visceral memories of life on the farm, but this is a reflection of the way that old Ireland was changing.

I mean, the 20th century for many, many countries was transformative, but for Ireland arguably even more so in terms of its politics, obviously achieved independence in terms of the way its economy functioned. This is a country that is Not the country it was before. And that sense of the potatoes, the symbol of Irish, you know, the most enduring symbol of the 19th century in Ireland is the [00:29:00] potato because of the famine.

The idea of that potato as being something moulding just over a hundred years after the famine is Heaney looking back and saying, That country is not here anymore. It is in flux. It is in transition.

Maiya: And he honors that changing past, you know, as we've discussed throughout this episode, there is never a sense that he's not grateful for it, and the experience that has come before him. There is a thread throughout this poem of both the father and the grandfather doing a repetitive action.

Obviously this action is the digging. There is a repetition specifically of the word digging multiple times in the poem. But that repetitive action is also reflected in the final stanza of the poem. Heaney sets an intention for himself. And as we mentioned right at the start of this podcast, He was, at this point, an incredibly young poet. He was 27, this was his first collection. He was setting intentions for all of his collections to come. And what he does, at least [00:30:00] in my readings of this poem and this collection as a whole, is he honours himself. Between my finger and my thumb, the squat pen rests. I'll dig with it. He tells the reader, he tells the audience, that this pen will be his tool to forge forward into the present. And, you know, I have a collection sat right in front of me of Seamus Heaney's poems, and it is 500 pages long. He has an incredible, incredible legacy of that is relevant to that very first intention he set in digging.

Joe: 100%. We are engaging with Heaney at this stage right at the beginning of a career that, when we look at it in retrospect, speaking in 2024, ranks alongside any poet of any era. I mean, the sheer number of awards, the sheer number of accolades, , the institutions he worked in, the roles he held.

He was Oxford Professor of Poetry, held very prestigious roles in the United States. Of course, we've already mentioned that Nobel Prize win. In 1995, [00:31:00] just talk a little bit about that and the way in which that contrasts with the figure I mentioned earlier on who looms large over Irish literary history, which is W.

B. Yeats. I'm sure it won't be long until we cover Yeats in an episode because he, he's a big deal. He won a Nobel Prize in 1923, , at which point he was widely considered to be one of the world's premier poets and 1923 is just after the establishment of what was then the Irish Free State, which went on to become what we call the Republic of Ireland today.

He was writing at a hugely transformative period of Irish history. Like I said, just after the establishment of the Irish Free State, after the , Irish War of Independence against British rule. And he and his Nobel Prize win comes in 1995, just three years before the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, which brought the Troubles to an end.

So, they're both awarded the pinnacle. of the literary world at hugely transformative moments for the country of Ireland in which they were writing, which shaped them, but of course like any great writer they also shape the country in which they are setting their works and they're writing their [00:32:00] works in.

So it's very possible to look at Irish history solely through the lens of the way in which these two writers have intersected with that history. So Heaney's career begins just before the Troubles, And his career peaks in terms of accomplishment just before the end of The Troubles. It's this really interesting parallel with the way that the violence, the landscape and the history of Ireland informs the poet who went on to be regarded as the, probably the greatest Irish poet since Yeats, who in turn had had a similar relationship to his own country in the 20th century.

You know, on this podcast, we talk a lot about how poetry transcends the page that it's on, how it links to the context in which it was written. And of course. How it continues to be reimagined in the context in which it's read and, I mean, even 60 years later, we're here talking about this poem.

It still retains its power, it still retains that visceral sense of Heaney's youth. And I just, I think it's remarkable, I really do. 

Maiya: I completely [00:33:00] agree and I think the legacies of Heaney, of Yeats are in no small part due to the fact that these conflicts aren't just stand alone moments in history, they have repercussions throughout. I was in Belfast myself a few months ago, and as someone who came over from England to see Heaney. That violence played out throughout the city, even to this day, just shows that there is a community of people who absolutely can receive poems by Heaney, by Yeats, that speak to their specific legacy, and are still just as relevant today as they were 60 years ago.

Joe: Yeah, I think it's really important to try to take a long lens when we think about these things. We might think of 1966 as being a long time ago, but what is that in relation to us, relation to us as individuals, in relation to the lives of our parents or grandparents? Sure. But if we think about the relationship between a poet and a [00:34:00] nation, rather than a poet and an individual, the nation of Ireland as an independent state is scarcely a hundred years old.

And actually, the poets like we've mentioned Heaney, Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh other writers, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, they actually are all writing within the first hundred years of a nation as an independent state. 

Maiya: Which only further strengthens the familial relations within this poem, because the father and the grandfather three generations of people about covers that time period.

Joe: No, absolutely right, and obviously, you know, I'm sure many of our listeners will be aware that we've talked a lot about Ireland as an entity. Of course, the political makeup of Ireland and its relationship to the UK is complicated. Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom, but, , Heaney himself, despite being born in Northern Ireland, always considered himself Irish and not British, and so that's why we've been talking about him more in the context of the Irish literary tradition.

Then we have the British, but it remains an incredibly complicated issue, and as Maiya said, if people go visit Belfast today, the reminders of the troubles, the [00:35:00] reminders of that sectarian violence are still very palpable. And the constitutional questions that surround Northern Ireland and its relationship to the Republic of Ireland remain as pertinent today as they ever do, 

Maiya: Well, unfortunately, Joe, that is all we have time for today. That was an absolutely fascinating conversation on Heaney and I definitely feel like I learned a lot. So I hope all of the listeners enjoyed, , next week, we'll be discussing Danez Smith and some of their incredible work. So tune in on our next episode to find out a little bit more about them. So it's goodbye from me.

Joe: And goodbye for me.