Seamus Heaney writes about
man and nature and also man in nature. He writes about the
relationship between perhaps himself, the poet, and his father,
the rural man.
In the collection Death of a Naturalist Heaney
writes about all these themes using the backdrop of Ireland.
He concentrates on using Irish language references and suggests
that you can find out much about your history through the
land.
All three poems looked at here are about memories and the
power they can have over your character. The poet seems to
find strength in his own role as a writer as he re-remembers
the world where he grew up. He sees himself as both different
and similar to his father.
In the first poem, 'Digging', which is one of Heaney's most
famous poems, the poet sits wondering when and what he is
going to write. The pen he is holding is like a loaded gun.
The use of the word 'squat' seems to suggest the pen is squarish
and blunt; he likens it to a tool.
He notices his father digging
beneath him and here we are not sure if he is actually seeing
his father or remembering him as the pen and the window mentioned
suggest he is trying to write and this may be the first memory
he conjures up.
The writer is therefore not centre-stage in the picture:
his father is. Rather, the poet is the onlooker, the outsider
to the real physical work. His father is seen as working his
will or perhaps working with nature, 'a clean rasping sound'.
The use of the word 'clean' seems to suggest it is a pure
and fine activity to be doing. The enjambment used 'I look
down/ Till is straining rump' conveys the idea that this is
a memory he is seeing. This third stanza talks about how his
father is digging 'twenty years away'. The split sentence
helps us to understand that this is a kind of zoom-in to an
image that happened a long time ago, like a pause.
It seems that the poet is young and that his father was a
big physical being as the first glimpse we get of the father
is 'his straining rump'. The poet is not describing someone
dignified but someone who could be a farmer or a gardener.
The position of the father also suggests that he is part of
nature as he is 'among the flowerbeds' and he 'comes up' 'Stooping
in rhythm through potato drills'. He seems to be integrated
into the living beat of the plants and the vegetables he is
working with.
This is further suggested in the fourth stanza when the poet
describes how good his father's digging technique is. In the
fifth stanza the poet talks about the importance of family
traits being handed down through the generations 'the old
man could handle a spade'.
Heaney sees it as admirable to be old and a man. But Heaney
also suggests in the fourth stanza that we deal with more
than just our present selves when we dig and also more than
just our grandfathers or our sons. We are also communing with
our ancestors, our history, and he predominantly sees this
as connected to nature, and in this poem nature is seen as
the soil.
For example, 'He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright
edge deep' suggests not only how good he was at digging for
potatoes which would feed his family and ensure the survival
of that family, but that he is making real connections with
ancestral history. Heaney shows this idea implicitly by using
the words 'rooted' and 'buried' and 'deep'. It is as if we
only have to dig to understand ourselves and where we come
from.
Heaney then moves on to how he admires the simple activity
of digging which he sees as nourishing to the body and soul.
The young poet as a boy brings his father milk 'corked sloppily
with paper' and then after drinking it he falls to digging
again, 'going down and down/ For the good turf.' Heaney sees
this as real living, this working on nature for the turf which
would be used for keeping his family warm: turf was used for
fuel in Ireland in these times.
Towards the end of the poem Heaney begins to bring together
his ideas. The world of nature becomes more and more real
through sounds and smells, 'The cold smell of potato mould,
the squelch and slap/Of soggy peat, the curt cuts'. The alliteration
brings alive the reality of nature. Now that the poet can
smell and so really see the memory he becomes aware of his
place in history as the 'living roots' appear which are the
roots of his ancestors. It has to be through the land which
his ancestors worked with that he can begin express himself
as a human being. But he feels small and diminished now he
has thought of them; that, as a writer he cannot truly live
like they did 'I've no spade to follow men like them.' He
suggests finally that he will move towards emulating them
through his writing, and through the pen that at the beginning
he suggested was a tool. Now we know it is a spade: 'I'll
dig with it'. This repeated stanza brings a circularity to
the poem which suggests the memory of his father has inspired
him to keep going and follow through the generations, making
his own mark.
The second poem also looks at the figure of the father in
nature while looking at the poet’s relationship to his
father. It centres again on the physical aspect of the father
as strong. Words like ‘globed’ and ‘strained’
suggest his strength and dominance over the landscape. In
the first stanza it sounds as if he is as strong as any beast
as even the horse is under his power, ‘The horse strained
under his clicking tongue’. Although the father does
not speak, he is suggested as intelligent in a different way
as he understands and can communicate his commands to the
horse. That way, Heaney shows communication with the natural
world is important to the father, and the way the poet writes
about him shows he thinks this is important too.
The short statement which opens the second stanza ‘an
expert’ confirms this idea. The father is physically
adept in the natural world. He can ‘set’ and ‘fit’
and the technical terms used ‘headrig’ prove he
is a highly sophisticated human being, perhaps what Heaney
considers a ‘real’ man. This dominance in the
natural world becomes more extended when the language in the
third stanza which describes his eye becomes parallel to that
which might describe the land. It is ‘narrowed’
and ‘angled’, ‘mapping the furrow’.
The image seems to suggest the father’s face as being
full of furrows as the land he is working on might be. This
similarity suggests a focus and a knowledge of the land that
is very precise and he sums this up by the end of the first
half of the poem in the word ‘exactly’.
The second half of the poem focuses on the poet as a boy
as the language used here describes someone who is uncertain
young and trying to follow in the footsteps of his father.
This is shown immediately in the first line, ‘I stumbled
in his hob-nailed wake’. ‘Hob-nailed’ again
suggests the sure-footedness of his father that the young
boy does not yet have. It also suggests his well-made man-made
shoes, the importance of rural industry, which is a recurring
theme in the collection, of Irishness being connected to nature
and industry within nature on a small scale.
It suggests how if you are an Irish boy the knowledge you
must acquire comes from the watching of your father working
the land. Land represents history to Heaney and family, and
the two combined produce a simple and aspirational view of
life. The image of the sod returns, which is where Heaney
thought knowledge came from and returned to. You become aware
of the rhythm of the poem in this standard and the rhymes
become more obvious ‘sod’ and ‘plod’.
It mimics the rhythm of his father working and living and
the living connection the boy feels for his father.
The last two stanzas sum up the boy’s feelings for
his father and his ambition to become him and work the land.
He aspires to his size ‘broad shadow’ and he wants
to physically be his size ‘stiffen my arm’ and
to acquire these manly actions ‘close one eye’
but it so happens in the last stanza that after the short
stumbling sounds of his youth ‘tripping, falling/ Yapping’
– in spite of all these, he becomes the stronger one
‘It is my father who keeps stumbling’ What you
do not know but perhaps is suggested is that the weakness
is mental rather than physical. Because the poet is a master
of language is might be he is better with ideas than with
the land and is superior to his father because of the limitation
of being adept to working in the land. So the poem seems to
say that working in the land and knowing your family history
and so yourself through nature is idealistic; that maybe everyone
finds their own strength and age is the downfall and the sadness.
‘Mid-term Break’ takes a different setting to
the other two poems and places the poet in school as a young
boy. We are in a very human situation as we become aware of
the time in the first stanza ‘Counting bells’.
The alliteration in that line mimics the ticking of the clock
and this awareness of the time suggests the boy is waiting
for something. It is very accurate so it is also a memory
of an important event.
The structure of the poem is different here. The fact that
three lines are used to each stanza reflects the pain of remembering;
they are like snippets of moments of memories, but accurately
or glaringly remembered. Here in the second stanza you meet
the father again, but he is different, less idealistic, ‘I
met my father crying’.
The language differs from the first two poems as the images
conveyed are different. The whole situation is different.
This is not about history and digging and being with nature.
They are standing in 'the porch' and there are real people
mentioned 'Big Jim Evans'. This suggests there are other people
there in the house, crowding in as if someone had died, which
is a particularly Irish custom. There is an awareness of different
generations, as there is a baby and some old men in the boy's
house. He is young and does not know how to deal with the
customs of people dying, he is 'embarrassed' and also confused.
This confusion is shown in the way that he hears other people
whispering about him and the phrase of consolation he is given
'"sorry for my trouble"'. It is as if he, in all
the confusion, does not know who has died, because as the
youngest, he has not directly been told. Or perhaps he does
not understand the concept of death yet as he is quite young.
Perhaps this may be the true nature of a memory that Heaney
wants us to understand. When a sad event changes your life
it may not be remembered clearly. What is remembered are the
almost unimportant things: the material aspects of the house,
because you are so shocked you cannot feel any emotions. The
poet's eye can only rest on the physical objects because the
death is too painful to deal with.
It becomes clearer that it was his younger brother that died,
'A four foot box, a foot for every year', and that he had
been ill for the last six weeks. The Irish tradition of bringing
the corpse home is mentioned and the poet looks at his brother.
The poignancy of the youth of the child is described, simply,
'He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.' The association
of the poem with physical objects which contrasts to the other
poems which concentrate on the connection of man to nature
and through that you know your history, shows how he was too
young to have a true association with anything. This is summed
up through the coffin and the cot. He is and will always be
confined within these man-made objects, not able to forge
a life through digging or through writing as the other male
members of his family have and will go on to.
In all three poems the idea of the importance of the family
is put across and this is achieved through using a particularly
'Irish' language: for example, there are references to Irish
traditions which reveal the importance Seamus Heaney lays
on Irish history, because traditions can be reminders of the
past. The effects of the poems are to make the reader consider
his own place in history and realise the importance of being
aware of his own environment: is there any activity, like
digging, that he can think of, that will show him the way
to his own understanding for why he is alive? Overall, this
is what Heaney wants us to think about. He takes something
very simple and points out the honesty, truth and 'reality'
of that activity. As the poems are written in simple language,
showing often poignant or funny glimpses of childhood, they
are enjoyable poems to read. The connection the poems make
between digging and growing up are interesting and visually
imaginative- it is this growing of a vivid picture that is
the greatest achievement of these three poems.
Please note: The above essays and dissertations were written by students and then submitted to us to display and help others. Thanks to all the students who have submitted their work to us.
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