Digging

I enjoyed this poem because it seemed more easily read than some of the other poems. What I gathered from it was that the speaker uses his pen as a tool much like his father and grandfather used shovels. He delivers a lot of sensory images: "...cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap of soggy peat" (Heaney 25-26). Maybe he is embarrassed that he can't do what these older relatives can do (sweat labor). Yet I wonder if he seems grateful because thinking of how his father and grandfather handle their shovels triggers his brain to wake up, "[t]hrough living roots awaken in my head" (Heaney 27). If he is a writer maybe he gives credit to his father and grandfather for putting those images there, to enlighten him to write the words of whatever he is writing. Line 28 implies that maybe there is a lower self esteem, "[b]ut I've no spade to follow men like them" (Heaney 28). In a way he is a man but not the man he feels he should be (strong), to follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather.