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Digging
2 pages, Unknown Binding
First published January 1, 1966
31 people want to read
About the author
Seamus Heaney
343books1,038followersWorks of Irish poet Seamus Justin Heaney reflect landscape, culture, and political crises of his homeland and include the collections
Wintering Out
(1972) and
Field Work
(1979) as well as a translation of
Beowulf
(1999). He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1995.
This writer and lecturer won this prize "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past."
.
This writer and lecturer won this prize "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past."
.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
July 23, 2022
This poem romanticizes and lionizes the vocation of digging and then endows the operation of digging with a broader and widespread implication.
To convey an idea as moving as this one, simply within a span of 30 lines, is justly an accomplishment any poet can be conceited of.
The reader is presented here, with pictures of dissimilar kinds of digging by country-labourers, such as digging flower-beds, digging ‘potato-drills� and digging peat bogs. All these types fluctuate from one another in approach and procedure.
As against such factual and corporeal digging with spades, the poet sets an in general, diverse, intellectual digging of a writer with his pen, which, gleaning the thoughts and sentiments from life’s understandings, spreads them shrewdly on paper, going through the same basic task of deconstruction and reconstruction which his labourer-ancestors performed with their adroit spades.
Through the central metaphor the poet secures the unity of the poem in a marvellous manner:
“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:�
Like the poems of Burns and Wordsworth, those of Seamus Heaney, specially the earliest pieces like Digging, take us close to men who live close to the soil of the village, engaged in dignified labour.
The resident haunt of rural Northern Ireland, where the poet was born and brought up, comes animate with its fields and bogs, its reek of potatoes and resonance of digging. Per se nature is an essential part of his theme, always teaching men the lessons of life.
To convey an idea as moving as this one, simply within a span of 30 lines, is justly an accomplishment any poet can be conceited of.
The reader is presented here, with pictures of dissimilar kinds of digging by country-labourers, such as digging flower-beds, digging ‘potato-drills� and digging peat bogs. All these types fluctuate from one another in approach and procedure.
As against such factual and corporeal digging with spades, the poet sets an in general, diverse, intellectual digging of a writer with his pen, which, gleaning the thoughts and sentiments from life’s understandings, spreads them shrewdly on paper, going through the same basic task of deconstruction and reconstruction which his labourer-ancestors performed with their adroit spades.
Through the central metaphor the poet secures the unity of the poem in a marvellous manner:
“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:�
Like the poems of Burns and Wordsworth, those of Seamus Heaney, specially the earliest pieces like Digging, take us close to men who live close to the soil of the village, engaged in dignified labour.
The resident haunt of rural Northern Ireland, where the poet was born and brought up, comes animate with its fields and bogs, its reek of potatoes and resonance of digging. Per se nature is an essential part of his theme, always teaching men the lessons of life.
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November 25, 2024"But I've no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with. "
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with. "
August 6, 2018
tense shift,
object shift,
internal rhyme,
slant rhyme.
object shift,
internal rhyme,
slant rhyme.
October 13, 2018
Absolute beauty.
March 27, 2019
"Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun."
განმეორები� ვკითხულო� ამ სიტყვებს და ჩემი პოეზიი� განრისხებუ� დემონს შა� ცრემლს ვაპკურებ...
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun."
განმეორები� ვკითხულო� ამ სიტყვებს და ჩემი პოეზიი� განრისხებუ� დემონს შა� ცრემლს ვაპკურებ...
December 25, 2022
Torn between the romantization of his childhood and the new way of recovering his origins
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
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