Poetry by Heaney about Childhood
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This poem is like Follower, as it shows how the young Heaney looked up to his elders - in this case both father and grandfather.
Seeing his father (now old) “straining” to dig “flowerbeds”, the poet recalls him in his prime, digging “potato drills”. And even earlier, he remembers his grandfather, digging peat. He cannot match “men like them” with a spade, but he sees that the pen is (for him) mightier, and with it he will dig into his past and celebrate them.
Heaney challenges the stereotype of Paddy with a spade. The stereotype contains some truth - Irishmen are justifiably well known for digging, but Heaney shows the skill and dignity in their labour. We see also see their sense of the work ethic - the father still digs in old age, the grandfather, when he was working, would barely stop to drink.
Note: the pen is “snug as a gun” because it fits his hand and is powerful. Heaney is from County Derry (Northern Ireland) but the poem was published in 1966, before the “troubles”, and this is not a reference to them.
This poem has a looser structure than Follower and looks at two memories - the father digging the potato drills, the grandfather digging turf, for which he was famous as the best digger on the peat bog. The poet celebrates not so much their strength as their expertise. The digger's technique is exactly explained (“The coarse boot nestled on the lug...”). Each man dug up what has real value
Again there are
The onomatopoeia (where the sound resembles or suggests meaning) is obvious in “rasping”, “gravelly”, “sloppily”, “squelch” and “slap”.
There is a central extended metaphor of digging and roots, which shows how the poet, in his writing, is getting back to his own roots (his identity, and where his family comes from). The poem begins almost as it ends, but only at the end is the writer's pen seen as a weapon for digging.
The poem is about the death of Heaney's infant brother (Christopher) and how people (including himself) reacted to this. The poem's title suggests a holiday but this “break” does not happen for pleasant reasons. For most of the poem Heaney writes of people's unnatural reactions, but at the end he is able to grieve honestly.
The boredom of waiting appears in the counting of bells but “knelling” suggests a funeral bell, rather than a bell for lessons. The modern reader may be struck by the neighbours' driving the young Seamus home - his parents may not have a car (quite usual then - Heaney was born in 1939, and is here at boarding school, so this is the 1950s) or, more likely, were too busy at home, and relied on their neighbours to help.
The father, apparently always strong at other funerals, is distraught (very upset) by his child's death, while the mother is too angry to cry. “Big Jim” (apparently a family friend) makes an unfortunate pun - he means to speak of a metaphorical “blow”, of course. The young Seamus is made uneasy by the baby's happiness on seeing him, by hand shaking and euphemisms (evasions, like “Sorry for my trouble”), and by whispers about him. When late at night the child's body is returned Heaney sees this as “the corpse” (not a person).
This contrasts wonderfully with the final section of the poem, where he is alone with his brother. Note the personal pronouns “him”, “his”, “he” - as opposed to “the corpse”. The calm mood is beautifully shown in the transferred epithet (“Snowdrops/And candles soothed the bedside” - literally they soothed the young Heaney). The flowers are a symbol in the poem, but also in reality for the family (a symbol of new life, after death). The bruise is seen as not really part of the boy - he is “wearing” it (a metaphor), as if it could come off. Heaney likens the bruise to the poppy, a flower linked with death and soothing of pain (opiates come from poppies). The child appears as if sleeping (a simile). We contrast the ugly “corpse, stanched and bandaged”, which becomes a sleeping child with “no gaudy scars” - dead, but, ironically, not disfigured. The last line of the poem is most poignant and skilful - the size of the coffin is the measure of the child's life. We barely notice that Heaney has twice referred to a “box”, almost a jokey name for a coffin.
Overall, we note the contrast between the embarrassing scenes earlier and the final section where, alone with his brother, Heaney can be natural.
The poem has a clear formal structure, in three line stanzas with a loose iambic metre. There are occasional rhymes but the poem's last two lines form a rhyming couplet, and emphasise the brevity of the child's life. Many of the lines run on - they are end stopped only in the last line of a stanza, and in three cases the lines run on from one stanza to the next. As in much of Heaney's poetry, there is no special vocabulary - mostly this is the common register of spoken English.
The title of this poem is ambiguous - it shows how the young Heaney followed his father literally and metaphorically.
The child sees farming as simply imitating his father's actions (“close one eye, stiffen my arm”), but later learns how skilled the work is. He recalls his admiration of his father then; but now his father walks behind (this metaphor runs through the poem). Effectively their positions are reversed. His father is not literally behind him, but the poet is troubled by his memory: perhaps he feels guilt at not carrying on the tradition of farming, or feels he cannot live up to his father's example.
The poem has several developed metaphors, such as the child's following in his father's footsteps and wanting to be like him. The father is sturdy while the child falls - his feet are not big enough for him to be steady on the uneven land.
There are many nautical references:
In these images the farmer is not shown as simple but highly skilled.
Heaney uses specialized terms (a special lexicon or register) from ploughing - terms such as “wing”, “sock” and “headrig”. There are many active verbs - “rolled”, “stumbled”, “tripping”, “falling” and “yapping”. There are lots of monosyllables and colloquial vocabulary, frequently as the rhyme word at the end of line. Some of these terms sound like their meaning (onomatopoeia), like “clicking”, “pluck” and “yapping”.
The metre of the poems is more or less iambic (in tetrameters - four poetic feet/eight syllables to each line) and rhymed in quatrains (stanzas of four lines). We see a phrase without a verb written as sentence: “An expert”. The poet uses contrast - apart from the general contrast of past and present we note how:
In thinking about the poem you might like to consider these questions:
In this poem Heaney looks at man's relationship with the land - the cultivation of the potato is a way into Ireland's social history. The first and last of the four sections depict the digging and gathering in of the potato crop today. The second section looks more closely at the potato, and the third is an account of the great Potato Famine of 1845-1850. We sometimes associate the gathering in of food crops with offering thanks to God (as in the Harvest Festival) but here Heaney suggests that the Irish labourers have a superstitious or pagan fear of a nature god (the “famine god”) whom they must appease with their offerings.
Although the farmer uses a mechanical digger to turn up the soil in which the potatoes lie, the job of gathering in the potatoes still relies on human workers. The machine turns up the roots and the labourers, in a line, bend down to fill their wicker creels (baskets). As they fill their baskets, they leave the line to drop the potatoes into the pit, where they will be stored. Though the work is hard, and makes the workers' fingers “go dead in the cold”, they work almost automatically (“mindlessly”) made tough by their “Centuries of/fear and homage to the famine god”. The folk memory of the great famine makes them ready for almost any hardship, in pursuit of full stomachs.
The potatoes come in different colours (according to the variety). The second stanza explains how they sprout and grow in their native soil. Although the great famine, caused by blight, happened more than 150 years ago, still each year the potato harvest can be an anxious process, as the workers smell the potatoes and feel them for firmness - making sure they are free of the blight. (A fungus-like organism, called Phytophthora infestans, causes the disease. This organism harms only the potato and, to a lesser extent, the tomato, a member of the same plant family.) In this account, they come out, exuding “good smells” and undamaged by the digger - “a clean birth”, to be “piled in pits”. They resemble skulls, but are alive. They have eyes (sprouting points) but these are blind - they have not yet sprouted.
In the third stanza, Heaney uses exactly the same phrases - “Live skulls, blind-eyed” - but this time referring to the people who suffered in the great famine of 1845. Poor people (that is most people) in Ireland at this time relied almost wholly on the potato as their staple food. This explains why they would even eat “the blighted root” - but there was no real crop to speak of, and the blighted potatoes could not feed the people. The “new potato”, which seemed “sound as stone”, would rot within a few days of being stored - and “millions rotted along with it”. The phrase is ambiguous - it means that millions of potatoes rotted, but makes us think of the people who died. (The population of Ireland dropped from 8 million before the famine to 5 million afterwards. Perhaps a million died, while others left for England or the United States of America.)
Those who survived were famished - Heaney likens this to the sharp beaks of birds snipping at people's guts. The people are shown as desperate and demoralized - “hungering from birth” - and cursing the ground, “the bitch earth”. As this section moves back in time at the start, so it ends by returning to the present, where the “potato diggers are” and “you still smell the running sore” - as if the blight opened a wound that has never healed.
In the fourth and final section, the workers take their lunch break - they no longer depend on the potato for their own food (though they earn their pay by digging it). Instead they have “brown bread and tea”, and their employer serves it, while there is no shortage, and they “take their fill”. But they are not taking any chances - the earth is not to be trusted (“faithless ground”). As they throw away the dregs of the tea and their breadcrumbs, they make their offerings - “libations” - to this god whom they fear and must appease.
The poem has a clear formal structure - the four sections go together rather as the movements in a symphony. In presenting the main subject, the “Potato Digging” of the title, Heaney makes two excursions - to inspect the marvellous food plant in close-up, and to recall the terrible history with which it will always be associated in Irish memory.
The first and last sections have a loose iambic metre (a mix of tetrameters and pentameters) and a clear ABAB rhyme scheme - which breaks down only in the poem's final line. (Why might Heaney do this?). The second section has fewer rhymes in an irregular pattern, so the effect is not very obvious to the reader. But the third section uses rhyme in pairs: AABB and so on. Here the rhyme words are emphatic, an effect made stronger by the trochaic metre. (The stress usually falls on the first syllable of each pair. This metre works well for bitter political verse - Shelley uses it in his Mask of Anarchy.)
The poem abounds in images. Heaney uses natural metaphors - of rock (“flint”, “pebbles” and “stone”), of bodies (“skulls” and “blind-eyed”), or of animals (“bird” and “bitch”) - to describe things. There are many images that suggest religious belief or ceremony - but no mention of the established Christian faith: “processional”, “god” (note the small “g”), “homage”, “altar”, “thankfully”, “fasts” and “libations” (liquid offerings, usually poured onto the ground or an altar, in many ancient religions). Alliterative effects are everywhere - “grubbing” and “grafted” or “pits” and “pus”. And the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, which is often monosyllabic, makes use of technical or dialect words, as well as sound effects (like onomatopoeia).
Small details are very telling, for example:
As in Digging, the labourers' work is a symbol - but of what?
This poem dates from the late 1960s. Perhaps farming methods have changed in Ireland since, but in most of the world still the work is done by human labour - and, just as in 19th century Ireland, many people's lives depend on a single crop.
The poem is about how we lose innocence. It is ambiguous and ironic - Heaney appears to endorse the view that "sentiments" displaced by "living" are "false", but ends with an unconvincing cliché: "Pests have to be kept down", and a cheap jeer at townies. In fact the young Heaney's reaction seems to be the one the poet really approves.
The poem recalls a particular incident (the "first" time Heaney, as a boy, witnessed the farmhand killing kittens) and how he (the poet) became used to this in time. Now, he writes, he has a similar indifference to the death of animals. Note how Dan Taggart justifies his action by suggesting kitten have no value ("scraggy wee shits") and the adult Heaney does the same, even swearing like Dan ("bloody pups"). We see an older person try to deceive a child to protect him from his compassion ("Sure isn't it better for them now?" - but the child is not convinced).
There are some striking details. The title is a country expression for emptying one's bowels - this idea is developed in the reference to dung. There is a suggestion of the sound of drowning in "frail metal" and "tiny din", and onomatopoeia in "sickening tug". The kitten is likened (simile) to "wet gloves" (woollen gloves, which become waterlogged) and later to "dung" - they are put on the "dunghill" and become like dung.
Most striking of all is the oxymoron "glossy and dead" (a glossy coat is usually seen as a sign of animal health). There is irony at the end - sentiments are not "false" (and saying this doesn't make them so) and "it makes sense" is not true. Honest and direct language earlier in the poem is here replaced by cliché: "cuts ice" and "pests have to be kept down" - this would be inept if Heaney really thought the expressions persuasive. Tight and regular rhymed three-line stanzas (loosely terza rima) carry the argument clearly. Note: there is a comma after "still" (it works like "nevertheless" or "all the same"; it does not qualify "living").
This poem presents a lesson in which children listen to classical music and write without any other direction. There is no sense of direct or didactic instruction from the teacher (no “writing frames” or “literacy strategy”). There is also no sense of judgement - or “assessment”. At the time of its publication (1966), the poem may have seemed to capture the spirit of the times - it is optimistic and positive, trusting the child to find his or her own truths and medium of expression. It also makes a daring connection between the sensual (but not primarily rational or intelligible) pleasure of listening to classical music and the more considered and reflective activity of writing. The teacher's “notes” (what today would be the lesson plan) describe the activity, but without any mention of “aims” or “targets”.
The poem is ambiguous: the poet sees that the children are unsure what to do, yet sees that something has happened - there are “new looks”. The teacher is comfortable with the idea that the children “have forgotten” him. The last line seems to apply both to the notes in the concerto and to the children.
Over the time since Heaney wrote the poem, this liberal and humane approach to learning first became almost the mainstream practice, only to be attacked and rejected for a more explicitly didactic and systematic approach, driven by concerns (or fears?) about attainment and “targets”.
We note that the poet is present as the teacher - we will find this in other poems, such as Lawrence's A Snowy Day at School. (Seamus Heaney, like Lawrence, really did work as a teacher for a while.) He writes himself into the scene. Like many of the poets, he writes of the children generally. (In this small selection there seems to be a gender difference here - it is the women who name names and write of individuals. Is this typical of anything more widespread? Or is it merely a quirk of the selection of poems?)
The poet uses no special lexis - though one contemporary neologism quickly passed out of the common register, and now helps us fix the date of the poem. This is the final verb in the question: “Can we jive?” Heaney writes as if he shares a common culture with his readers - so, for example, he refers to “Beethoven's Concerto Number Five”. He can suppose that, at the very least, they will know that Beethoven is one of the very greatest of composers. Perhaps he expects them to know, too, that the piece in question is the Piano Concerto No. 5 in E flat, Opus 73, known as the Emperor Concerto. Some of them may even know what this concerto sounds like.
There is a more obscure reference in “mixing memory and desire”. Heaney may be using it comically - it comes from the bleak opening of T.S. Eliot's modernist poetic manifesto, The Waste Land. But the phrase “with chalk dust” is incongruous and fairly bathetic - not a very reverent use of this highly serious (but perhaps self-important and grandiose) line.
Heaney expects the reader to share an interest in what fascinates him - the way these young learners and writers struggle to express themselves. He does not seem to seek credit for what nonetheless may appear admirable to many readers - his patience in not intervening, but allowing the children (in a safe and familiar environment) to work out their own solutions. In today's system preoccupied with levels, grades and targets, such confidence might be impossible. The title of the poem seems gently to mock this liberal approach - but it is ambiguous, and a trap for our prejudices. We may assume that “play” is somehow inferior to real study. But Heaney perhaps also thinks here of the old proverb about how all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy - and “dull” in the proverb carries its original sense of lacking intelligence. (We preserve this sense in its opposites “bright” and “brilliant”.) Any hint of mockery in the title is not sustained in the poem that follows.
The poem, on closer inspection contains details that the poet sees as familiar to contemporary readers - but which now read like evidence for social history. “Milk-tops” are the tin-foil seals for the glass bottles (a third of a pint in capacity) filled with milk that were issued, at the expense of the British government, to schoolchildren. The “drinking straws” would be passed through a hole or tear in the foil top. The “record” is the vinyl disc - still a familiar sight in clubs, but increasingly rare in domestic music-playing systems. And the “pens” were perhaps still of the kind the writer would dip into an inkwell - these were in common use up to 1970. (The writer of this guide was using them in the year when Heaney published this poem.) The reference to “snares” may strike us now as archaic and bucolic - Heaney came from the country, and the children in the class would have seen snares, and probably set them. Today we may know that they are some kind of animal trap, but we maybe cannot visualize how they work.
You may be asked to do this in an exam. While you write about one poem, make brief references to another, if relevant. At the end of your work, try to bring the two together - exam boards gives marks for cross-references. GCSE examiners expect this for higher grades.
Follower and Digging are about Heaney, as a child, and his father (and grandfather). Both poems:
The Early Purges and Mid-Term Break are about death, but are very different in approach. Both:
But where one leads to an ambiguous and cynical conclusion, the other is open and honest, in the same way in which Follower is able to display emotion (love of a father) freely.