The turf cutter and the nine-to-five man: Heaney, Larkin, and "the spiritual intellect's great work." - poets Seamus Heaney and Philip Larkin

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1997 by James Booth

Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it. (ST 56)

Heaney's attitude goes beyond the political distrust of an Irish writer for English. His is the distrust of a turf cutter for language itself.

Thus his characterization of "Digging" as "a big coarse-grained navvy of a poem" (P 43) sounds less like a shamefaced concession than a proud boast - evidence that he has achieved his aim of vying with the admired turf cutters of his youth, by using his poetry to "dig." The poem's "vivid stumblings" (Simmons 41), guarantee its ingenuous authenticity. Instead of poetic elevation Heaney provides the simple rhetoric of a list. Adjective-plus-noun constructions clog the poem as wet peat clogs the boots: "squat pen," "rasping sound," "gravelly ground," "straining rump," "coarse boot," "tall tops," "bright edge," "cool hardness," "good turf," "cold smell," "soggy peat," "curt cuts," "living roots," "squat pen." And the larger gestures of the poem are couched in a homespun rural idiom: "By God, the old man could handle a spade," "But I've no spade to follow men like them" (DN 13-14).(4)

While Larkin obeys the siren call of the spirit to pursue Beauty, Heaney rolls up his sleeves and digs. Lacking a spade, he may not be able to achieve his father's and grandfather's primitive authenticity, but he will still dig, if in a more archaeological or (horti)cultural sense. He sees poetry "as a dig, a dig for finds which end up by being plants" (P 41).(5) And these imaginative "finds" vie with peat itself in their substantial solidity. He shows the same "piety towards objects" that he so admired in P. V. Glob's book on the ancient corpses retrieved from peat bogs (Morrison 46). When Heaney describes blackberries, a settle bed, a pitchfork, the poetry is often only marginally more elaborate in form than the bare naming process itself. A thesaurus list of synonyms becomes a religious chant:

Rivetted steel, turned timber, burnish, grain, Smoothness, straightness, roundness, length and sheen. Sweat-cured, sharpened, balanced, tested, fitted. The springiness, the clip and dart of it. (ST 23)

A frequent feature in such lists, as here, is the use of full stops instead of commas within a grammatically sequential sentence (after sheen and fitted). This denial of syntactical structure serves to concentrate the poem on irreducible things. The music of "what happens" becomes the music of "what is."

For Heaney, then, the writing of poetry is less a matter of composition than of discovery. The poem's "making," its embodiment in syntactical progressions and metrical forms, is a less intrinsically poetic action than the initial revelation of its subject, or object. "The crucial action" in the inception of a poem is "pre-verbal." Heaney quotes Robert Frost to the effect that poetry arises from a "lump in the throat," and continues:

As far as I am concerned, technique is more vitally and sensitively connected with that first activity where "the lump in the throat" finds "the thought" than with "the thought" finding "the words." The first emergence involves the divining, vatic, oracular function; the second, the making function. To say, as Auden did, that a poem is a "verbal contraption" is to keep one or two tricks up your sleeve. (P 49)