Anger and nostalgia: Seamus Heaney and the ghost of the father

Eire-Ireland:Journal of Irish Studies, Fall-Winter, 2001 by Adrian Frazier

Heaney once quoted the wonderful defense of biography given by Yeats (some may recognize it as the epigraph to Roy Foster's life of Yeats): (20)

   [A poet's] life is an experiment in living and those who come after him
   have a right to know it. Above all, it is necessary that the lyric poet's
   life be known, that we should understand that his poetry is not a rootless
   flower but the speech of a man; that it is no little thing to achieve
   anything in art, to stand alone perhaps for many years, to go a path no
   other man has gone, to accept one's own thought when the thought of others
   has the authority of the world behind it ... to give one's own life as well
   as one's words (which are so much nearer one's soul) to the criticism of
   the world.

In the 1980s, Heaney certainly gave his life to the criticism of the world: he granted over fifty interviews for publication, so many that in 1990 he told Eileen Battersby of the Irish Times that "I don't even believe I was born on a farm in Derry anymore." (21) The biographical record is nothing like complete, but enough has come to light to throw certain crucial poems into new relief.

"Digging" is the poem with which Heaney begins all his various collections and selections, the wellhead of his verse, the first poem in which he felt he had "let down a shaft into real life." (22) Earlier it was understood that this poem concerned the generation gap created by modernization in Ireland, one particularly opened up by the 1947 Education Act, which enabled children from poor families to go to university. What seemed remarkable was the sentiment: the son did not scorn old ways in the manner of the modern young man who knows it all; full of filial piety, he revered the commonest labor of his father and grandfather on the farm and bog, and promised to carry on family traditions in his writing. In the poem's moment of experience, one imagines the father still on the farm, tilling the family acres, while the poet in a university town bends over his lonely desk, recalling a time he was in his room writing or studying while he saw his father below the window working in the garden. And certainly in the poems that followed in The Death of a Naturalist and Door into the Dark, he appeared to be as good as his word: their whole vector delves back and down and under, and the emotion remains one of reverence for rural craftsmen.

A problem remained in the poem for critics, a detail that did not fit. In the first lines of the poem, Heaney's pen strangely rests "snug as a gun" between his finger and thumb--

   Between my finger and my thumb
   The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

In the repetition of the opening lines at the end, the gun is gone:

   Between my finger and my thumb
   The squat pen rests.
   I'll dig with it.

As guns don't rest between a finger and a thumb, the simile is awkward, rammed into the poem. Why was the gun put in? And why did it disappear? A famous rule for the art of dramatic composition is attributed to Chekhov: if there's a gun in Act One, it must go off in Act Four. This poem breaks that basic rule. The gun is still loaded, lying around unfired when the poem ends. For that matter, in this collection weapons are buried all over the farm: grenades, safety-catch, armoury, gun-barrel, cache, bombs all turn up in Death of a Naturalist. (23)