I was going through old files and I found this, an “annotation” on craft from my MFA. It was wonderful to go back fifteen years and see what I was thinking; it was also wonderful to reread this poem by Sheamus Heaney.
I never drank in high school or college. All wine tasted about the same to me, and I preferred to take my calories as ice cream or chocolate. I also leaned toward science classes in college; Freshman English was my only course that focused on literature. So, you wouldn’t have asked me to write about books or poems or fine wine at that point of my life. But later, traveling in France with my future husband, I developed a taste for alcohol and books; my enjoyment was enhanced by being wildly in love. I couldn’t really describe what distinguished a good wine from a bad one, good writing from mediocre. But I knew what I liked.
At the beginning of my MFA, I was assigned two poetry books, Seamus Heaney’s Poems 1965-1975, and Manual Hernandez’s I Have Lots of Heart. I finished them both in one sitting. To continue with the fine wine analogy, it was a little like downing a case of Bordeaux while eating peanut butter sandwiches.
In the Heaney collection, I marked about fifteen poems that made an impression on that first pass. I then read those each two or three times through, to try to figure out what made them stand out. So, in poetry, I was still in the “I know what I like” stage. Sometimes it was the topic that interested me, like a stillborn child in Elegy for a Stillborn Child. Sometimes it was the way the poem sounded when it was read aloud, which I guessed had to do with rhythm or alliteration. The first poem, Digging, was the one I was continually drawn back to. I particularly liked the way it sounded when read aloud, and I loved its wonderful imagery:
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 the 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.
Heaney compares his writer’s pen to the shovel that his father and grandfather used to dig up potatoes and to cut turf for fuel. So, in a way, he is comparing his craft, of digging for ideas, or “the good turf,” to the craft of his ancestors as they made their living in ancient ways, by living off the land with skill and persistence. He makes a wonderful picture, with the narrator looking out his window, seeing his father working in the garden, bending down, and coming up “twenty years away.” This language evokes the passage of time and the passing on of a way of life from generation to generation. The comparison of pen to shovel also allows one think of the writer digging for truth, exposing family secrets long buried, suddenly being dug up and exposed to sunlight, to be examined.
But he also compares the pen to a gun. Is he talking about veering away from the old life? When saying “the spade sinks into the gravelly ground” he makes me think about killing something and then burying it. Although “gravelly” is not the same as “grave,” that odd adjective turns my mind in that direction. The idea of the narrator not being able to continue the tradition of skilled farmer, but rather moving on to a new way of life, is alluded to in the second to last stanza with “But I’ve no spade to follow men like them,” and, in the final stanza, talking about his pen: “I’ll dig with it”.