On August 30, 2013, the world lost a man
who was arguably the greatest living poet of the English language. Seamus
Heaney was 74 years old, and he had won nearly every major English poetry prize
in existence, including the T.S. Eliot Prize (2006), The Nobel Prize in
Literature (1995), and the E.M. Forster Award (1975). By critics and popular
readers alike, Heaney is recognized today as the greatest Irish poet since W.B.
Yeats, and there are even many (like myself) who consider his work better than
Yeats’. During his remarkable life, Heaney’s words impacted the cultural
landscape of Ireland in a way that hearkens back to medieval times, when the
country was governed by priests and poets. Yet beneath the hype and poorly
concealed envy that followed Heaney throughout his life, his poetry retained a
much more elemental significance.
When I was younger, Seamus Heaney was
always that one writer in all of the English literature and poetry anthologies
whose date of birth was not followed by a date of death. This was of course a
cause of great wonder and jealousy for me and for any school-aged writer with
ambitions of one day making it into the literary canon – while still being
alive to enjoy it. So far, however, everything I’ve written about Heaney
strikes me as cold and informational. To truly do justice to what his words
meant to me, I can only reproduce his poem “Digging,” which remains for me one
of the most perfect poems I’ve ever read…
“Digging”
Between
my finger and my thumb
The squat
pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my
window, a clean rasping sound
When the
spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My
father, digging. I look down
Till his
straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends
low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping
in rhythm through potato drills
Where he
was digging.
The
coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against
the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted
out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter
new potatoes that we picked,
Loving
their cool hardness in our hands.
By God,
the old man could handle a spade.
Just like
his old man.
My
grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any
other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I
carried him milk in a bottle
Corked
sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink
it, then fell to right away
Nicking
and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his
shoulder, going down and down
For the
good turf. Digging.
The 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.
Between
my finger and my thumb
The squat
pen rests.
I’ll dig
with it.
In addition to being one of my favorite
poems, “Digging” is also one of the best examples I’ve ever seen of Ezra
Pound’s famous statement that, “Poetry must be as well-written as prose.”
Seamus Heaney’s poetry is quite prosaic in its own right. The man does not
create any music that is not already an organic part of his descriptive diction.
Whereas many poets would use verbal pyrotechnics to convince the reader of
their literary worth, there is a modesty and practical wisdom to Heaney’s
language that is both inspiring and bittersweet. And for the poetry nerds out there, I’d also
like to point out how much I think Heaney’s simple use of spondee makes this
poem such an excellent piece. Phrases like “squat pen,” “coarse boot,” and
“good turf” help give a stolid rhythm and structure to the piece, thus allowing
the rest of the somewhat prosaic phrasing to let its inner music express itself
by virtue of its contrast with each of these spondees. Simply put, if one were going to
teach a class on how to write engaging, accessible poetry, I would start with “Digging.”
Tomorrow, Seamus Heaney will be buried in
his home village of Bellaghy. It is impossible to know where Heaney is now; but
what we do know is that it’s time for a new generation of poets to grab their
pens and start digging.
