Seamus Heaney

I'm not really a poetry person, I suck at writing it and despite the fact that it was so easy to analyse I still struggled with it. Turns out literature just wasn't for me. I'm not the analysing type (a bit ironic coming from the Art's student, I know). I do like reading poetry though, some of it anyway.

One poem I do love and that I thank Mr James for sharing with us is Digging by Seamus Heaney. We didn't study this poem, we did study Heaney though and I think I developed a certain of grudging fondness for his work over the two years of studying him in VCE Literature under Jamesy's tutelage.
Here I give you Digging by Seamus Heaney from Death of a Naturalist (1966).

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

Under my window, a clean rasping sound   
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:   
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds   
Bends low, comes up twenty years away   
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills   
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft   
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.   
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

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

The last stanza (+ last line of the second last stanza) is my favourite, it's a source of inspiration for a maybe-book I'll most likely never finish. It just struck me when we read it, Mr James finished and there was that heavy silence afterwards before he prompted us for discussion.
"It's about family." He wrote it down on his tablet/laptop in his near indecipherable scrawl and we copied the same into our books.
"It's about branching out from family tradition."
"It's about acceptance."
"Acceptance of yourself and acceptance from your family."
"It's about being different and the uncertainty that comes with that."
"It's about dirt." - There's always got to be a smart ass.

Seamus Heaney wrote about so many things and I really did enjoy studying him but this poem is my favourite.