GCSE English Literature – Seamus Heaney
About the poet
Seamus Heaney was born on April 13, 1939, on a farm in Castledawson,
County Derry, Northern Ireland, the eldest of eight children. In 1963, he began
teaching at St. Joseph's College in Belfast. Here he began to write, joining a
poetry workshop with Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, and others under the
guidance of Philip Hobsbaum. In 1965 he married Marie Devlin, and in 1966
year he published his first book of poetry, Death of a Naturalist. His other
poetry includes Door into the Dark (1969), Wintering Out (1972), North (1979),
Selected Poems 1965-1975 (1980), Station Island (1984), The Haw Lantern
(1987), New Selected Poems 1966-1987 (1990) and Seeing Things (1991). In
1999 he published a new translation of the Old English heroic poem Beowulf.
Seamus Heaney is a Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and
Letters. He was Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1989 to 1994. In 1995 he
received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Heaney has lived in Dublin since 1976.
Since 1981 he has spent part of each year teaching at Harvard University,
where he is a Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory. Writing about Heaney in
1968, Jim Hunter, said:
“His own involvement does not exclude us: there are few private references,
and the descriptive clarity of his writing makes it easy to follow...Heaney's
world is a warm, even optimistic one: his tone is that of traditional sanity and
humanity.”
You can see whether, and how far, this is true of all the poems in the
Anthology, some of which were written after these words.
Storm on the Island
The poem considers the ideas of isolation and living so close to nature. But
mainly it depicts the destructive powers of nature, amplified for the islanddweller. Heaney refers to three of the elements - earth, water and air. The
poem challenges the idea that island life is idyllic - the sea is not “company”
but like a cat, seemingly tame, yet apt to turn “savage” and spit. At the end of
the poem comes the irony - we are fearful of “empty air”, or a “huge nothing”.
So the poem appears to question whether our fears are real or imaginary (of
course, physicists and meteorologists know that air is not “a huge nothing”).
Heaney uses a series of military metaphors: the wind (like a fighter-bomber)
“dives and strafes” while space is a “salvo” and air bombards (a metaphor
from artillery or, more aptly here, naval gunnery).
The poem is written in iambic pentameter lines - mostly blank verse, but with
half-rhyming couplets at the beginning and end. The poem opens confidently,
explaining why the island dwellers trust in their preparations - but when the
storm breaks, they can do nothing but “sit tight”.
Richard Williams, Royton & Crompton School, 2006
A Specialist Science College
Adapted from materials available at www.eriding.net/amoore
GCSE English Literature – Seamus Heaney
The poem begins by showing how the island dwellers adapt their outlook to
their situation - so the fact that there is no hay becomes an advantage (“no
stacks/Or stooks that can be lost”). But soon the disadvantages appear - the
absence of trees means both that one cannot hear the sound of wind in
“leaves and branches”, nor is there any “natural shelter”. On the other hand,
the violence of nature can exceed what we expect to happen. We might have
a picturesque idea of the sea crashing against the cliffs - spectacular, but not
really threatening. But the wind is so strong that the spray hits “the very
windows” of people's houses. Heaney explains this with the simile of a cat much of the time one expects it to be “company” and “tame” (safe and
predictable). But in the storm it turns “savage” and “spits”.



How in this poem does Heaney suggest the power of nature?
Does the poem suggest that extreme weather is frightening or enjoyable
for people (or both, perhaps)?
What do you think is the meaning of the last line of the poem?
Perch
This seemingly simple poem shows how the perch lives up to its name keeping its place while the river and everything else moves past or around it.
Heaney uses the metaphor of “holding the pass” (like soldiers defending a
strongpoint) to show how the perch remain unmoved. They may seem to
sleep, as they are “adoze” (=dozing; Heaney makes up the word which is like
asleep, alive and adrift in its form) but they rely on their “muscle” to guzzle the
current. We see the fish from the human viewpoint, looking down into the
clear river, but also from their own viewpoint - “under the water-roof”. The
metaphor here, like a riddle, is of a kind popular in Old English poetry; it is
called a kenning (Old English examples include “helmet-bearer” for “warrior”
and “whale-road” for the sea).
Heaney says of this poem:
“...these perch, although they are actually in the river, they are very much in a
kind of fifty-five year old memory lake of my own...I think that water is
immediately interesting. It's just as an element it is full of life. It is associated
with origin, it is bright, it reflects you.”
The poem has a simple form - five couplets with half-rhyme (assonance
rhyme, which uses a different vowel sound in each rhyme word). The metre is
mostly anapaestic, with some iambic feet, especially at the ends of the lines this works because the stress falls on the last syllable, whether of two or three.
The pattern is also varied at the start of some lines, which open with a
stressed syllable - “Perch”, “Near” and “Guzzling”. (In terms of the metre this
syllable serves as a poetic foot on its own.)
The poem is striking for the number of monosyllabic words the poet uses, and
for groups of words with the same vowel: “grunts...slubs...runty”.
Richard Williams, Royton & Crompton School, 2006
A Specialist Science College
Adapted from materials available at www.eriding.net/amoore
GCSE English Literature – Seamus Heaney
Heaney also indulges in wordplay - the two senses of “perch” in the first line
and the pun on “finland” (not to be confused with the country of “Finland”)
which is echoed by “fenland”.
Note: The Lower Bann river, which drains Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland is
celebrated for its coarse fishing, and is probably the river mentioned here.





What is the poet's view of the perch?
In what ways are the perch like people?
How does the poet describe the river here?
Explain the way the poet contrasts ideas of movement and staying still in
Perch.
How does the poet use sound effects in the poem?
Blackberry-picking
This poem gives a vivid account of picking blackberries. But it is really about
hope and disappointment (how things never quite live up to our expectations)
and blackberry picking becomes a metaphor for other experiences.


In the first half of the poem Heaney describes the picking - from the
appearance of the first fruit to the frenzy of activity as more fruit ripens.
The second half of the poem concerns the attempt to preserve the berries
- always a failure, as the fungus set in and the fruit fermented. (Now that
many people in the west have freezers, this problem is solved. But do
many young people still go to pick blackberries?)
In the first section Heaney presents the tasting of the blackberries as a
sensual pleasure - referring to sweet “flesh”, to “summer's blood” and to “lust”.
He uses many adjectives of colour (how many can you find?) and suggests
the enthusiasm of the collectors, using every available container to hold the
fruit they have picked. There is also a hint that this picking is somehow violent
- after the “blood” comes the claim that the collectors' hands were “sticky as
Bluebeard's” (whose hands were covered with the blood of his wives).
The lusciousness of the fresh fruit contrasts with what it quickly becomes “fur”
and “rat-grey fungus”, as “lovely canfuls” smell “of rot”.
The poem is set out in iambic pentameter couplets with half rhyme. Like many
of Heaney's poems it is full of monosyllabic nouns: “clot”, “knot”, “cans”, “pots”,
“blobs”, “pricks”, “byre”, “fur”, “cache”, “bush”, “flesh” and “rot” (there are
others). The poem has a clear structure - the two sections match the two
stages of the poet's thought.
This poem is ambiguous in its viewpoint, too. We see the view of a frustrated
child in “I...felt like crying” and “It wasn't fair”, but a more detached adult view
in the antithesis of “Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.” The
poem looks at a theme that is as old as poetry itself - the transitoriness of
Richard Williams, Royton & Crompton School, 2006
A Specialist Science College
Adapted from materials available at www.eriding.net/amoore
GCSE English Literature – Seamus Heaney
pleasure (how good things do not last), and relates it to a familiar childhood
experience.
Heaney suggests that what is true of blackberries may be true of good things
generally. But this is argument by analogy. Nowadays we can preserve our
fruit by freezing it - so does this mean that hopes are not disappointed after all?




How far is this poem about something particular or about life in general?
Explain how the poem contrasts ideas of expected pleasure and
disappointment.
Does this poem give the viewpoint of a child or an adult or both?
Can you explain why Heaney, in the last line, says that he “hoped” for
something, even though he “knew” it would not happen?
Death of a Naturalist
This poem is similar to Blackberry-Picking in its subject and structure - here,
too, Heaney explains a change in his attitude to the natural world, in a poem
that falls into two parts, a sort of before and after. But here the experience is
almost like a nightmare, as Heaney witnesses a plague of frogs like
something from the Old Testament. You do not need to know what a flax-dam
is to appreciate the poem, as Heaney describes the features that are relevant
to what happened there - but you will find a note below.
The poem's title is amusingly ironic - by a naturalist, we would normally mean
someone with expert scientific knowledge of living things and ecology (what
we once called natural history), someone like David Attenborough, Diane
Fossey (of Gorillas in the Mist fame) or Steve Irwin (who handles dangerous
snakes). The young Seamus Heaney certainly was beginning to know nature
from direct observation - but this incident cut short the possible scientific
career before it had ever got started. We cannot imagine real naturalists being
so disgusted by a horde of croaking frogs.
The poem has a fairly simple structure. In the first section, Heaney describes
how the frogs would spawn in the lint hole, with a digression into his collecting
the spawn, and how his teacher encouraged his childish interest in the
process. In the second section, Heaney records how one day he heard a
strange noise and went to investigate - and found that the frogs, in huge
numbers, had taken over the flax-dam, gathering for revenge on him (to
punish his theft of the spawn). He has an overwhelming fear that, if he puts
his hand into the spawn again, it will seize him - and who knows what might
happen then?
The poem is set out in two sections of blank verse (unrhymed iambic
pentameter lines). Heaney uses onomatopoeia more lavishly here than in any
poem - and many of the sounds are very indelicate: “gargled”, “slap and plop”
and “farting”. The lexicon is full of terms of putrefaction, ordure (excrement or
faeces) and generally unpleasant things - “festered”, “rotted”, “slobber”,
“clotted water”, “rank/With cowdung” and slime kings”.
Richard Williams, Royton & Crompton School, 2006
A Specialist Science College
Adapted from materials available at www.eriding.net/amoore
GCSE English Literature – Seamus Heaney
In the first section, the poet notes the festering in the flax-dam, but can cope
with this familiar scene of things rotting and spawn hatching. Perhaps, as an
inquisitive child he felt some pride in not being squeamish - he thinks of the
bubbles from the process as gargling “delicately”. He is confident in taking the
frogspawn - he does it every year, and watches the “jellied specks” become
“fattening dots” then turn into tadpoles. He has an almost scientific interest in
knowing the proper names (“bullfrog” and “frogspawn”) rather than the
teacher's patronizing talk of “daddy” and “mammy”, and in the idea of
forecasting the weather with the spawn. (Not really very helpful, since you can
see if it is raining or sunny by direct observation - no need to look at the
frogspawn.)
The second section appears like a punishment from offended nature for the
boy's arrogance - when he sees what nature in the raw is really like, he is
terrified. This part of the poem is ambiguous - we see the horror of the plague
of frogs, “obscene” and “gathered...for vengeance”, as it appeared to the
young boy. But we can also see the scene more objectively - as it really was.
If we strip away the effect of imagination, we are left with a swarm of croaking
amphibians. This may bring out a difference between a child in the 1940s and
a child in the west today. The 21st century child knows all about the frogs'
habitat and behaviour from wildlife documentaries, but has never seen so
many frogs at close range in real life. The young Heaney was used to seeing
nature close up, but perhaps never got beyond the very simple account of
“mammy” and “daddy” frogs. The teacher presents the amphibians as if they
were people.
The arrival of the frogs is like a military invasion - they are “angry” and invade
the dam; the boy ducks “through hedges” to hide from the enemy. Like
firearms, they are “cocked”, or they are “poised like mud grenades” (a
grenade is a hand-bomb - the frogs, in colour and shape, resemble the Mills
Hand Bomb, used by British soldiers from the Great War to modern times).
The poem has some echoes of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Rime of the
Ancient Mariner - in a shorter and more comic version: the would-be naturalist
is, like the mariner, revolted by “slimy things”; the Ancient Mariner learns to
love them as God's creatures. Heaney indulges in a riotous succession of
disgusting descriptions: “gross-bellied”, “slap and plop”, “obscene threats”
(suggesting swear words), “farting” and “slime kings”.
Wordsworth suggests that poets should use everyday language. In this poem,
Heaney uses terms we do not expect to see in poetry, and presents nature as
the very opposite of beautiful.
Notes on the poem

Flax is an annual plant (it grows from seed) some one to two feet high,
with blue flowers. A flax dam (traditionally called a lint hole), in Northern
Ireland is not really a dam, but a pool where bundles (called “beets”) of flax
are placed for about three weeks to soften the stems. The process is
called “retting”. Those who used to do this work report that the smell is
Richard Williams, Royton & Crompton School, 2006
A Specialist Science College
Adapted from materials available at www.eriding.net/amoore
GCSE English Literature – Seamus Heaney










very strong and unpleasant. Heaney describes the flax as held down by
“sods” (large clumps of earth or turf - a favourite word of the poet: count
how often he uses it here and in other pieces). In some dams large stones
would hold down the flax. Fibre from flax was cleaned and spun into yarn,
woven into linen and bleached.
The townland is the smallest administrative area in Northern Ireland. They
range in size from less than an acre to well over 2,000, while the average
is some 300 acres. The boundaries between them are often streams or old
roads.
Be careful how you write naturalist - keep the “al” in it, and don't mix it up
with naturist, which is an old name for someone who takes off his or her
clothes, to live in a “state of nature”!
How would you react (as a young adult or as a child) to the sight of a
horde of frogs invading a familiar place?
How far does this poem tell the truth about frogs and how far does it tell
the reader about the power of imagination?
Is this poem comic, serious or both? How far does the poet invite us to
laugh at him?
Heaney describes the frogs' heads as “farting”. As a boy he might have
said this word to friends, but would not repeat it at home or write it in
school work. How does it work in the poem?
Is it a good idea for teachers of the young to explain how animals live by
describing them in human terms, like “mammy” (mum or mummy) and
“daddy”?
How well does this poem fit in with your ideas of what poetry should
normally be like?
How truthful is the title? Did Heaney really lose his interest in, and love of,
nature. Or does the poem record only a dramatic change of attitude, or
something else? (Note, for example, that the poem called Perch was
published in 2001.)
Does this poem have anything in common with other poems by Heaney?
How far does it fit into a pattern of poems that show him not to be a real
country person (like his father and grandfather) - because he can't dig, he
can't plough, he gets upset when the blackberries start rotting and he is
frightened by a lot of frogs?
Digging
This poem is like Follower, as it shows how the young Heaney looked up to
his elders - in this case both father and grandfather.
Seeing his father (now old) “straining” to dig “flowerbeds”, the poet recalls him
in his prime, digging “potato drills”. And even earlier, he remembers his
grandfather, digging peat. He cannot match “men like them” with a spade, but
he sees that the pen is (for him) mightier, and with it he will dig into his past
and celebrate them.
Richard Williams, Royton & Crompton School, 2006
A Specialist Science College
Adapted from materials available at www.eriding.net/amoore
GCSE English Literature – Seamus Heaney
Heaney challenges the stereotype of Paddy with a spade. The stereotype
contains some truth - Irishmen are justifiably well known for digging, but
Heaney shows the skill and dignity in their labour. We see also see their
sense of the work ethic - the father still digs in old age, the grandfather, when
he was working, would barely stop to drink.
Note: the pen is “snug as a gun” because it fits his hand and is powerful.
Heaney is from County Derry (Northern Ireland) but the poem was published
in 1966, before the “troubles”, and this is not a reference to them.
This poem has a looser structure than Follower and looks at two memories the father digging the potato drills, the grandfather digging turf, for which he
was famous as the best digger on the peat bog. The poet celebrates not so
much their strength as their expertise. The digger's technique is exactly
explained (“The coarse boot nestled on the lug...”). Each man dug up what
has real value


food - “new potatoes”, and
fuel - “the good turf”.
Again there are



technical terms (“lug”, “shaft”) and
monosyllabic (“bog”, “sods”, “curt cuts”) or
colloquial terms: “By God, the old man could handle a spade.”
The onomatopoeia (where the sound resembles or suggests meaning) is
obvious in “rasping”, “gravelly”, “sloppily”, “squelch” and “slap”.
There is a central extended metaphor of digging and roots, which shows how
the poet, in his writing, is getting back to his own roots (his identity, and where
his family comes from). The poem begins almost as it ends, but only at the
end is the writer's pen seen as a weapon for digging.



How does the poem explore ideas of heritage and family tradition?
What does the poem suggest about physical labour?
Explain in your own words the image in the last line of the poem.
Mid-Term Break
The poem is about the death of Heaney's infant brother (Christopher) and how
people (including himself) reacted to this. The poem's title suggests a holiday
but this “break” does not happen for pleasant reasons. For most of the poem
Heaney writes of people's unnatural reactions, but at the end he is able to
grieve honestly.
The boredom of waiting appears in the counting of bells but “knelling”
suggests a funeral bell, rather than a bell for lessons. The modern reader may
Richard Williams, Royton & Crompton School, 2006
A Specialist Science College
Adapted from materials available at www.eriding.net/amoore
GCSE English Literature – Seamus Heaney
be struck by the neighbours' driving the young Seamus home - his parents
may not have a car (quite usual then - Heaney was born in 1939, and is here
at boarding school, so this is the 1950s) or, more likely, were too busy at
home, and relied on their neighbours to help.
The father, apparently always strong at other funerals, is distraught (very
upset) by his child's death, while the mother is too angry to cry. “Big Jim”
(apparently a family friend) makes an unfortunate pun - he means to speak of
a metaphorical “blow”, of course. The young Seamus is made uneasy by the
baby's happiness on seeing him, by hand shaking and euphemisms (evasions,
like “Sorry for my trouble”), and by whispers about him. When late at night the
child's body is returned Heaney sees this as “the corpse” (not a person).
This contrasts wonderfully with the final section of the poem, where he is
alone with his brother. Note the personal pronouns “him”, “his”, “he” - as
opposed to “the corpse”. The calm mood is beautifully shown in the
transferred epithet (“Snowdrops/And candles soothed the bedside” - literally
they soothed the young Heaney). The flowers are a symbol in the poem, but
also in reality for the family (a symbol of new life, after death). The bruise is
seen as not really part of the boy - he is “wearing” it (a metaphor), as if it could
come off. Heaney likens the bruise to the poppy, a flower linked with death
and soothing of pain (opiates come from poppies). The child appears as if
sleeping (a simile). We contrast the ugly “corpse, stanched and bandaged”,
which becomes a sleeping child with “no gaudy scars” - dead, but, ironically,
not disfigured. The last line of the poem is most poignant and skilful - the size
of the coffin is the measure of the child's life. We barely notice that Heaney
has twice referred to a “box”, almost a jokey name for a coffin.
Overall, we note the contrast between the embarrassing scenes earlier and
the final section where, alone with his brother, Heaney can be natural.
The poem has a clear formal structure, in three line stanzas with a loose
iambic metre. There are occasional rhymes but the poem's last two lines form
a rhyming couplet, and emphasise the brevity of the child's life. Many of the
lines run on - they are end stopped only in the last line of a stanza, and in
three cases the lines run on from one stanza to the next. As in much of
Heaney's poetry, there is no special vocabulary - mostly this is the common
register of spoken English.



Contrast the reactions of the two parents - how does the reader react to
this? With whom, do you think, is the mother angry?
How does the poem contrast the fuss of the homecoming with the
calmness of the scene when Seamus sees his brother's body?
What do you think is the meaning of the poem's last line?
Richard Williams, Royton & Crompton School, 2006
A Specialist Science College
Adapted from materials available at www.eriding.net/amoore
GCSE English Literature – Seamus Heaney
Follower
The title of this poem is ambiguous - it shows how the young Heaney followed
his father literally and metaphorically.
The child sees farming as simply imitating his father's actions (“close one eye,
stiffen my arm”), but later learns how skilled the work is. He recalls his
admiration of his father then; but now his father walks behind (this metaphor
runs through the poem). Effectively their positions are reversed. His father is
not literally behind him, but the poet is troubled by his memory: perhaps he
feels guilt at not carrying on the tradition of farming, or feels he cannot live up
to his father's example.
The poem has several developed metaphors, such as the child's following in
his father's footsteps and wanting to be like him. The father is sturdy while the
child falls - his feet are not big enough for him to be steady on the uneven
land.
There are many nautical references:




The father's shoulders are like the billowing sail of a ship.
The “sod” rolls over “without breaking” (like a wave).
The child stumbles “in his wake” and dips and rises on his father's back.
“Mapping the furrow” is like navigating a ship.
In these images the farmer is not shown as simple but highly skilled.
Heaney uses specialized terms (a special lexicon or register) from ploughing terms such as “wing”, “sock” and “headrig”. There are many active verbs “rolled”, “stumbled”, “tripping”, “falling” and “yapping”. There are lots of
monosyllables and colloquial vocabulary, frequently as the rhyme word at the
end of line. Some of these terms sound like their meaning (onomatopoeia),
like “clicking”, “pluck” and “yapping”.
The metre of the poems is more or less iambic (in tetrameters - four poetic
feet/eight syllables to each line) and rhymed in quatrains (stanzas of four
lines). We see a phrase without a verb written as sentence: “An expert”. The
poet uses contrast - apart from the general contrast of past and present we
note how:


the father's control is effortless (“clicking tongue” or “single pluck/Of reins”)
while the powerful horses (“sweating team”) strain, and how
the young Seamus “wanted to grow up and plough.” but all he “ever did
was follow”.
In thinking about the poem you might like to consider these questions:

What does the poem show of the relationship of father and son, and how
time has changed this?
Richard Williams, Royton & Crompton School, 2006
A Specialist Science College
Adapted from materials available at www.eriding.net/amoore
GCSE English Literature – Seamus Heaney


What does the last line of the poem mean? Does Heaney really want his
father to “go away”?
Is this a poem about farming specifically or is it relevant to other skills and
occupations? How does Heaney explore the idea of family tradition here?
At a Potato Digging
In this poem Heaney looks at man's relationship with the land - the cultivation
of the potato is a way into Ireland's social history. The first and last of the four
sections depict the digging and gathering in of the potato crop today. The
second section looks more closely at the potato, and the third is an account of
the great Potato Famine of 1845-1850. We sometimes associate the
gathering in of food crops with offering thanks to God (as in the Harvest
Festival) but here Heaney suggests that the Irish labourers have a
superstitious or pagan fear of a nature god (the “famine god”) whom they must
appease with their offerings.
Although the farmer uses a mechanical digger to turn up the soil in which the
potatoes lie, the job of gathering in the potatoes still relies on human workers.
The machine turns up the roots and the labourers, in a line, bend down to fill
their wicker creels (baskets). As they fill their baskets, they leave the line to
drop the potatoes into the pit, where they will be stored. Though the work is
hard, and makes the workers' fingers “go dead in the cold”, they work almost
automatically (“mindlessly”) made tough by their “Centuries of/fear and
homage to the famine god”. The folk memory of the great famine makes them
ready for almost any hardship, in pursuit of full stomachs.
The potatoes come in different colours (according to the variety). The second
stanza explains how they sprout and grow in their native soil. Although the
great famine, caused by blight, happened more than 150 years ago, still each
year the potato harvest can be an anxious process, as the workers smell the
potatoes and feel them for firmness - making sure they are free of the blight.
(A fungus-like organism, called Phytophthora infestans, causes the disease.
This organism harms only the potato and, to a lesser extent, the tomato, a
member of the same plant family.) In this account, they come out, exuding
“good smells” and undamaged by the digger - “a clean birth”, to be “piled in
pits”. They resemble skulls, but are alive. They have eyes (sprouting points)
but these are blind - they have not yet sprouted.
In the third stanza, Heaney uses exactly the same phrases - “Live skulls,
blind-eyed” - but this time referring to the people who suffered in the great
famine of 1845. Poor people (that is most people) in Ireland at this time relied
almost wholly on the potato as their staple food. This explains why they would
even eat “the blighted root” - but there was no real crop to speak of, and the
blighted potatoes could not feed the people. The “new potato”, which seemed
“sound as stone”, would rot within a few days of being stored - and “millions
rotted along with it”. The phrase is ambiguous - it means that millions of
potatoes rotted, but makes us think of the people who died. (The population of
Ireland dropped from 8 million before the famine to 5 million afterwards.
Richard Williams, Royton & Crompton School, 2006
A Specialist Science College
Adapted from materials available at www.eriding.net/amoore
GCSE English Literature – Seamus Heaney
Perhaps a million died, while others left for England or the United States of
America.)
Those who survived were famished - Heaney likens this to the sharp beaks of
birds snipping at people's guts. The people are shown as desperate and
demoralized - “hungering from birth” - and cursing the ground, “the bitch earth”.
As this section moves back in time at the start, so it ends by returning to the
present, where the “potato diggers are” and “you still smell the running sore” as if the blight opened a wound that has never healed.
In the fourth and final section, the workers take their lunch break - they no
longer depend on the potato for their own food (though they earn their pay by
digging it). Instead they have “brown bread and tea”, and their employer
serves it, while there is no shortage, and they “take their fill”. But they are not
taking any chances - the earth is not to be trusted (“faithless ground”). As they
throw away the dregs of the tea and their breadcrumbs, they make their
offerings - “libations” - to this god whom they fear and must appease.
The poem has a clear formal structure - the four sections go together rather
as the movements in a symphony. In presenting the main subject, the “Potato
Digging” of the title, Heaney makes two excursions - to inspect the marvellous
food plant in close-up, and to recall the terrible history with which it will always
be associated in Irish memory.
The first and last sections have a loose iambic metre (a mix of tetrameters
and pentameters) and a clear ABAB rhyme scheme - which breaks down only
in the poem's final line. (Why might Heaney do this?). The second section has
fewer rhymes in an irregular pattern, so the effect is not very obvious to the
reader. But the third section uses rhyme in pairs: AABB and so on. Here the
rhyme words are emphatic, an effect made stronger by the trochaic metre.
(The stress usually falls on the first syllable of each pair. This metre works
well for bitter political verse - Shelley uses it in his Mask of Anarchy.)
The poem abounds in images. Heaney uses natural metaphors - of rock (“flint”,
“pebbles” and “stone”), of bodies (“skulls” and “blind-eyed”), or of animals
(“bird” and “bitch”) - to describe things. There are many images that suggest
religious belief or ceremony - but no mention of the established Christian faith:
“processional”, “god” (note the small “g”), “homage”, “altar”, “thankfully”, “fasts”
and “libations” (liquid offerings, usually poured onto the ground or an altar, in
many ancient religions). Alliterative effects are everywhere - “grubbing” and
“grafted” or “pits” and “pus”. And the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, which is often
monosyllabic, makes use of technical or dialect words, as well as sound
effects (like onomatopoeia).
Small details are very telling, for example:

We note how the workers are able to stand upright for a moment, before
stooping again. The image suggests the way in which people with natural
dignity are forced to bow to their toil and humble themselves. The modern
Richard Williams, Royton & Crompton School, 2006
A Specialist Science College
Adapted from materials available at www.eriding.net/amoore
GCSE English Literature – Seamus Heaney

labourers may be free, but they may also still have something of the servile
mentality.
We see, too, that the starving people live in wicker huts - a suitable
material for the strong but light creels, yet somehow not substantial
enough for a comfortable and fireproof home.
As in Digging, the labourers' work is a symbol - but of what?

Are they digging up their past, a folk memory or a grievance that will never
be put right?
Notes on the poem


“Drill”, in the first line, does not refer to a machine, but the row of
potatoes - called a “drill” because the machine or person that plants the
seed-potatoes (not really seeds, but sprouting tubers) drills a series of
holes into which the seed-potatoes go.
“in 'forty-five” refers to the first year of the Irish Potato Famine - 1845.
The significance of the date may depend on the reader. English
readers may think of 1945 (the end of World War Two) and Scots may
think of 1745 (the Jacobite uprising under Bonnie Prince Charlie). The
omission of the first two digits also suggests the viewpoint of the people
at the time (as we now talk of the Swinging Sixties, rather than the
1960s) who do not need to identify the century. By using the same form,
Heaney suggests the way the memory has been passed on and kept
alive in the oral tradition.
This poem dates from the late 1960s. Perhaps farming methods have
changed in Ireland since, but in most of the world still the work is done by
human labour - and, just as in 19th century Ireland, many people's lives
depend on a single crop.





How, in this poem, does Heaney connect past and present?
What view does the poem give of man's relationship with the earth?
Does the poet really think (and want the reader to think) of the earth as a
“bitch” and “faithless”?
Modern readers in the west may no longer have a sense of where our food
comes from - does this poem challenge us not to take things for granted?
How does this poem explore ideas of religion, ritual and ceremony?
Richard Williams, Royton & Crompton School, 2006
A Specialist Science College
Adapted from materials available at www.eriding.net/amoore