Seamus Heaney Digging

Time 4 Reading!: Reading Seamus Heaney's "Digging"

The poem begins with a decision point, a decision men throughout time have had to make ... a question of, What do I do ? The speaker sees a world torn, and a conflicted space where men choose the tools of life, a world of "a spade" the "squat pen" and "a gun." This is where I enter this poem as a reader; I have felt that pull, the pull of the dichotomy, the world of war and world of peace. Do I take action? Do I simply observe? This poem makes the everyday resonate--it's all about the sound of the physical world. The metaphor created by those sounds, the call of past generations, truly echoes for me. This is my life, a life of dichotomies. I can hear Seamus reflecting on his father, reflecting on the pull of previous generations, a call to repeat, to fulfill, and another call, to choose his own path. I can remember creaking down my basement stairs as a child, wanting to find my grandfather, wanting to see a picture we had stacked with many others, after his death. I remember the smell of the box, the dust, the damp smell of ancient paper, and an image: my grandfather posed, on horseback as a member of the cavalry, a soldier in the Army. I was fascinated by the black and white, the yellowing of the picture, the frayed edges. I wanted to speak to him, to speak through the photo. Below that photo was a shot of my grandfather in the gorgeous dress uniform of the NYPD, him standing tall, iconic, a specimen for serious study. His face, his eyes, stoic, seemed to peer at me. In memory, I see myself there, alone, in the basement, having a conversation with him. I was probably wearing feety pajamas and sitting on the cool of the painted concrete. Around the same time, I, just like every other boy, began looking for my father, not the father I knew, the father who came home on the 7:08 P.M. train from Manhattan every evening. I was seeking the father who had in many ways followed his father and his older brother into adulthood, manhood, the military, and into service. Inside my father's closet, with its gentle scent of Old Spice, I came upon a ceramic pint, a pint that had been custom made and made specifically to mock my father's eyesight, or lack therof: the shining black pint has a cartoonish rendition of my father as "Corporal Magoo," an adapted version of the original Mr. Magoo , the nearly-blind cartoon character. (At the time I didn't know that the irony was genius. My father was a top shooter for an elite Army pistol team.

Digging

Seamus Heaney, the crisis of identity

Seamus Heaney, the making of the poet

Englische und amerikanische Dichtung: Englische Dichtung : von R. Browning bis Heaney

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