Poetry Discussion Week 1 - Seamus Heaney: Digging

[John Cole]

For me, anyway, the word "squat" doesn't fit with "pen." "Sleek," perhaps, but certainly not "squat." So, why does Heaney use this word choice? In general, it may have something to do with the pen as a tool, and it also fits with many of the other "u's" in the poem: "gun," "snug," "lug," for instance.

I think it's also interesting to note that the bottle he carries to his grandfather is "corked sloppily." When he participates in the work, he doesn't quite measure up at first.

An interesting poem for comparison to "Digging" is "Adam's Curse" by fellow Irishman, W. B. Yeats, in which Yeats writes about how the poet's work should look easy, but in reality the poem looks easy because it is the result of painstaking work.

Just a few more random thoughts on this poem.

[thecincykiddo]

just for fun...if i were to score this thread like a poem, where each entry was a line in, say, a quatrain, it would look like this:

abcd
bace
fbeb

a bit heavy on the b (me) but i'll respond anyway:

i kind of think of the 'squat' as an imagery choice to be associated with the 'straining rump' of his father, 'bending low'...that's part of why i thought that he was channeling his ancestors in a way earlier

it can be so easy to read into a poem from our own experiences, of course, but i've never thought that this is a bad thing. in fact, i think the best poets let us do so on purpose, by writing a poem that can express something solid without diminishing from our mental wanderings.

john sees milked 'corked sloppily' and registers a sense of inadequacy; i see the paper and think of a writer folding his own words over and over

[Phat Mack]

I am curious as to why he uses rhymes in the first two stanzas, then drops the rhyming.

[John Cole]

He is channeling his father; note that the sound triggers the memory, and the present to the past equals the digging into the memory. His father also does what he does with "rhythm," a telling word here.

Interesting idea about his folding the words over. I see the paper as a token of the poet's trade, but I also see that he goes about it sloppily in comparison to the way his grandfather cuts the turf.