File on Seamus Heaney

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Poetry File
Sarah Abdulaziz Abdussalam
Twentieth Century Poetry - 8E3

Contents
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Introduction 1
Seamus Heaney 1
Heaney: a Follower of Romanticism 1
The Personal and the General 2
The Trilogy 2
Several Connotative Meanings to Digging 3
Heaney’s Poetic Theory 4
Post-colonial Theory 5
Psychoanalytical Approach 5
Eco-critical Theory 5
The Pen/Spade Analogy 5
Techniques 6
Frost 6
Bogland 6
Words 7
Language 7
The Sense of Place 8
“Digging” 10
“Follower” 14
“Gravities” 17
“Personal Helicon” 21
“Midnight” 25

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Introduction
There’s always a link between the past and the present. Poets are parts of a continues chain to
which they add, or change. Modernist poets were trying to confront the changes of their time wither
scientific, moral, or literary and other details that form and structure their poetry.
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Seamus Heaney 1939 - 2013
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Seamus Heaney was a modern contemporary poet. A post-modern poet, started writing in the
1940s. He's a follower and representative of the Irish ancestry. His model poet was Yeats, the Nobel prize
winner. Heaney contributed to the Irish literature as much as Yeats, and won the Nobel prize as well. He
worked as lecturer abroad.
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What is his problem? Heaney was brought up in a country of divisions. Divisions is a keyword for him:
1. Geographical division, he lived in Mossbawn county which is in the border line where the right side
of it is the place for the English and the other is for the Irish. Even the county's name represent this
division.
2. In religion, the Catholics and the Protestants.
3. Division in the cultural background and in the language. There's the Celtic language which is the
original language of Ireland. But the English demolished it, they pulled the Irish out of their roots,
their history, civilisation, and language. Heaney learned the Celtic language to read the old history,
the folktales, and the Irish mythology. However, he depended on the translations more.
4. Division of loyalty. Heaney is loyal for both sides. He was brought up by English teachers, they
taught him proper poetry, and his role models were English poets. He felt gratitude and loyalty
towards them since he didn't have a reason to consider them as enemies. He showed this gratitude in
his collection of essays Preoccupations.
5. Division between his personal attachment to his tribe, to his family and his job as a poet. Poetry
became his profession, so he departs from the lines of his ancestry whom were all farmers. He was
the first in his family to be a literary figure. So he felt that he was doing something totally different.
He was wondering if he will excel in the field of literary as his ancestry excelled in the farming field.
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Heaney was brought up in a farm, so it became a main part of his life. His mother read him
Wordsworth, Shelley, and Shakespeare to teach him the value of words, beauty, and nature. So he was
brought up to like this kind of verse. And when he studied this poetry, then he started writing poetry
himself in college. Because of the division between his family and his work, he felt that the best type of
poetry is of the Romantics', a poetry of the self, a subjective poetry, it digs within the self. Heaney starts
writing his early poetry by digging within the self. And by being influenced by the natural environment,
he borrows his images from nature.
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Heaney: a Follower of Romanticism
1. He admits his indebtedness to William Wordsworth In Preoccupation, there's an essay entitled Feeling
into Words, opens with a quotation from Wordsworth's The Prelude to explain what he learned from
him.

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2. The natural environment and its strong influence on Heaney. So the Romantic poetry influenced him
as a theory. He's indebted to Wordsworth's theory of poetry. The backbone and the main settings of
Heaney's verse are in nature. And the major analogy in his poetry is borrowed from the land, the act
of digging in the ground.
3. His choice of everyday language.
4. The return to childhood and the importance of memory.
5. The mixture between the personal and the general. Heaney uses the personal for a general purpose,
which makes him more convincing and interesting to the reader.
6. The political problems of his time concerned him as much as politics concerned the Romantics.
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The Personal and the General
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When Heaney started his first collection, he started with the early stages of his life tracing his
relationship with his father whom is a symbolic figure of the Irish man. But the poems have these titles as
Follower, Digging, Mother, and Wife. So the personal note is present throughout the collection.
Therefore, some critics accused him of being an escapist. That he ran out from reality to his past,
childhood, and his farm. The answer to this accusation is that his mission is to shape a new image of the
Irish. The Irish image was still distorted, so he was reconstructing a new image. Second, his second
mission is to defend his identity as an Irish poet. He writes in English, so he had to prove his Irishness.
Then, he can talk about the land, the time, and the people. Hence, he talks politics.
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Heaney, like the Romantics, believed that if he didn't know himself and didn't define his mission,
then he cannot speak for others. He had to know himself and his approach first. It's a phase of divided
aims. Thus, the best approach is define where he belongs and then start confronting public problems. So
by speaking of a father or a mother, it doesn't that they are his real parents, he did learn from his father,
but it is also possible that the description in the poem doesn't fit his father. It's a symbolic figure that
inform the Irish people that they have an ancestry, and they should be proud of it. That they have to have
role models and they should emulate them, and take pride in them. A sense of belonging sprouts from his
admiration and gratitude towards his ancestry. These are things that he wanted to plant in his nation's
conscience. So he gives simple examples of a bigger picture. For instance, loyalty to the family as an
example of loyalty to the nation alerting the immigrated Irish people, and recovering their sense of
belonging. Using personal experiences is the best way to grab the people's attention. He used his father as
an example of the Irish farmer, he described as a professional and a giant figure since English has
damaged, shattered the image of the Irish people. They even described them as apes and barbaric.
Therefore, Heaney writes in this ways to better the image of his nation.
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The Trilogy
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Heaney defines his mission in his first poem in the first collection The Death of a Naturalist. Its title is
Digging.
The title of the second collection is Door into the Dark.
The title of the third collection is Wintering Out.

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The early poems define the poet, his language, his philosophy, his attitude, his imagery, and his
style. Changing his focus later isn't very important, what's significant is the roots, the beginnings.
Additionally, these three collection constitute a trilogy because there's a link between them, a
development from collection to another. He ends his first collection with Personal Helicon. The poem
closes with the line "I will set the darkness echoing." So the darkness in the title of the second collection
is the same as the darkness in Personal Helicon. It's a continuity. The darkness could mean everything
that's unknown, in the darkness, not knowing nor understanding anything, prevented to reach knowledge.
Knowledge is to see through things. So darkness stands for not only what's been covered, but also what's
been damaged by the English. For example, his history, his culture, his language. All that is considered
darkness for the young Irish poets. The truth is unknown, distorted by the English, so they're left in the
dark. The darkness is also personal, when he goes back to his roots. His family history concerns the
country as much as it concerns him because they're Irish living in Ireland.
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Darkness could be: history, ancestry, past, unknown, the hidden details of the past, the personal
direction, and could be a psychological side. Going to the dark, unknown area of the self. Heaney is a
poet who digs within the self and using that inner dig to reach the outer identity of the public issues. So
the inner and the outer are very much connected.
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Several Connotative Meanings to Digging
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1. the dig within the psychological self.
2. the dig within the memory. Memory of either the self or the past which could indicate the past of the
nation, or tribe. Going from within the self to the outer others.
3. the dig in the past history of his country to bring out details from the Irish past.
4. the dig in the Irish mythology.
5. the dig in the Celtic language.
6. the dig into the Irish landscape to bring out examples of names of places to identify his country.
7. the dig into the Celtic folklore.
8. the dig into the field of poetry and literature. The word field is a pun because his act is an act of
digging. The action of going inward to outward is what he does. The act is transferred into his writing
the same way, he starts by the present, and then he carries the readers into the past, and then brings
them back to the present. The land is structured in layers that are called strata. Each layer has a
different shape and colour, until the last layer which is water. Heaney takes these layers symbolically
as different stages which is very clearly applied in Personal Helicon in which each stanza takes the
reader to a different layer until they reach the water of the well, that is the well of the self in that
poem. So he transfers the natural scenes into acts in his verse. Heaney digs in the field of literature to
bring out the best in there, the best words, structures, language.This is the difficult mission that he has
as a poet. He made use of all the literary giant figures who constitute the layers until he produces his
own poetry, his own spring of verse.
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Heaney’s style isn’t to attack the English colonisers directly, but he points out the destruction they
brought to Ireland. So he didn’t escape, he’s a man who was trying to identify himself first as an Irish
poet, he’s reconstructing the Irish image, he’s proving that he’s a successful Irish poet who has an
independent type of verse different from the English. He doesn’t imitate the structure of the English poets.
He introduces in his poetry poetic words and style that makes his poetry typical Irish.
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Heaney's Poetic Theory
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There's a number of essays by Heaney that formulate his theory which he applies to his poetry.
The first essay is "Feelings into Words”, from his book Preoccupation (1968-1978) it includes his
definition of poetry, poets, techniques, and craftsmanship and the reason for using digging as the main
analogy that he run throughout his verse. Digging is not only a metaphor, it is a dynamic act that he
practices in writing poetry. He starts the essay by quoting Wordsworth's The Preludes, and he agrees with
Wordsworth's statement:
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"The hiding places of my power
Sèem open; I approach, and then they close;
I see by glimpses now; when age comes on,
May scarcely see at all, and I would give,
While yet we may, as far as words can give,
A substance and a life to what I feel:
I would enshrine the spirit of the past
For future restoration."
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“Substance” and “life” are keywords, they bring him close to the Romantics. They mean that he's
a subjective attitude that allows him to reflect his personal vision, feeling, and his own perception of
things. He would enshrine the spirit of the past for future restoration. Therefore, memory is very
important because returning to the past depends on memory. The word memory could include historical or
personal details, his own personal #memory is also included. All this is done through the power of the
mind. The hiding places are his mental powers of memory and imagination. As a young poet he has the
enthusiasm recall and to penetrate those hiding places. Heaney is alway digging into those #hidden
places. Then he says that those words are direct and precise for what I intend for my poetry:
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“Implicit in those lines is a view of poetry which I think is implicit in the few poems I have
written that give me any right to speak: poetry as divination, poetry as revelation of the self to the
self, as restoration of the culture to itself; poems as elements of continuity, with the aura and
authenticity of archaeological finds, where the buried shard has an importance that is not
diminished by the importance of the buried city; poetry as a dig, a dig for finds that end up being
plants.”
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"Revelation of the self to the self" brings us to the personal side where the poet digs
psychologically, inwards to discover himself. The other side is the "culture to itself" which is the cultural

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background. Thus, the private and the public are always combined, he's not an escapist. Heaney is the
second to decolonize the Irish history following the footsteps of Yeats. Both Nobel prize winners.
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"Poems are elements of continuity," linking past and present with the future with poems as
element of continuation, with aura of therefore it tells that poetry for him is discovery. To find the truth
and the shattered image of the English and to find out the folklore of Ireland so he digs into the past, the
tradition, the memory in order to surface these findings with which he'll constitute the new image of the
Irish. He will rewrite a history that the English destroyed.
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Pst-colonial Theory
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The text can be read using different theories, one of them is the post-colonial theory that speaks
about the expression of oppression and violence. The manner of his writing (style and structure) is typical
Irish and the language is English #hybridity. In his poem he speaks about finding a voice that is like a
fingerprint, used for identification. He frees his poetry from the influence of the English by giving it a
manner, technique, sound effect of words, structure, that are typical Irish. This fingerprint cannot be
copied, it is his own voice, it's his authenticity and genuineness. He learned from great benchmarks but to
be himself. He searches for a voice, a feeling of words, and that's why the title of the essay is Feeling into
Words. He's expressing his feelings insisting that poetry is a revelation of the self.
Poetry, as Heaney said, is a dig for finds that end up being plants. This is the conclusion of his
definition.It shows his focus on the dig.
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Psychoanalytical Approach
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Another theory is the psychoanalytical approach when we relate the text to the poet's mind and
personal life. With Heaney we apply a psychoanalytic approach due to his subjectiveness. He says that it
goes back to his personal life. He goes on to tell why he chose digging, he says that it originated from his
own environment. It's a metaphor that expresses his own admiration to the inner, hidden places. It's an
inward excavation.
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Eco-critical Theory
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The eco-critical theory, like the romantics, focuses on how the natural environment influences the
writer. And it is a large umbrella that we find beneath it political and social environments. Plus his sense
of protecting this environment. So the contextual reading of the text must place it in its natural, political,
and social environments.
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The Pen/Spade Analogy
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“The pen/spade analogy was the simple heart of the matter and that was simply a matter of almost
proverbial common sense.” (Heaney)
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The gun has two function, to attack and protect which is exactly his mission, "snug as a gun." ‘the
pen’s lighter than the spade’. Heaney said, but is the mission also lighter? No. He moves on after
expressing his admiration to the act of digging to quote from *Philip Sydney, his definition of poetry in
his Apologie for Poetry: ‘Among the Romans a Poet was called Vates, which is as much as a Diviner . . .’
And he agrees with Sidney that there's a relation between the diviner and poets, because a poet makes
contact with the hidden areas. Therefore, he's the ability to express and bring to the surface all these
details.
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Techniques
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Heaney differentiates techniques from the craft of writing. Craft can be learned. Techniques,
however, cannot be learned because it's personal.
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"Technique, as I would define it, involves not only a poet’s way with words, his management of
metre, rhythm and verbal texture; it involves also a definition of his stance towards life, a
definition of his own reality. It involves the discovery of ways to go out of his normal cognitive
bounds and raid the inarticulate: a dynamic alertness that mediates between the origins of feeling
in memory and experience and the formal ploys that express these in a work of art. Technique
entails the watermarking of your essential patterns of perception, voice and thought into the touch
and texture of your lines; it is that whole creative effort of the mind’s and body’s resources to
bring the meaning of experience within the jurisdiction of form. Technique is what turns, in
Yeats’s phrase, ‘the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast’ into ‘an idea,
something intended, complete.’ (Heaney)
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Frost
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He refers to Robert Frost who puts it this way: ‘a poem begins as a lump in the throat, a
homesickness, a lovesickness. It finds the thought and the thought finds the words.’ Heaney agrees with
him on the two first points. However, he disagree with "the thought finds the words," because finding
words to Heaney is a conscious act of the poet.
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Boglad
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He goes on to comment on the features of the bog. And he has many poems that involves details
from the bogland. He choose the bogland because as he said he "began to get an idea of bog as the
memory of the landscape, or as a landscape that remembered everything that happened in and to it."
Ireland is an agricultural country, and the relationship between a farmer and their land is faithful. Heaney
made a strong connection between memory and bogland, memory supplies him with all the details he uses
in his poetry, and believed that the bog represents the national consciousness of Ireland.
Heaney wrote a book called "The Bog People" and it's concerned with human bodies preserved in boxes.
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Words
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He goes on to highlight his role as a poet and historian saying that "words as bearers of history
and mystery began to invite me." He explains that he's an admirer of words from his childhood. "Maybe it
began very early when my mother used to recite lists of affixes and suffixes, and Latin roots, with their
English meanings, rhymes that formed part of her schooling in the early part of the century." In his poetry,
the sound effect becomes very important way of removing the English influence, liberating the Irish verse
from the English influence.
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Frost also stresses the importance of the sound and sense, through the sound of words we get the
meaning. Heaney explains how he developed his writing in the second collection Door into the Dark, he
says that "words themselves doors."
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Language
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Jonathan Swift is an 18th C writer of prose and poetry, he was one of the Irish who wrote in the English
language living the hybridity, oppression, and divisions between the English and the Irish. During the
19th C, political and economical reasons led to the divisions, and English became the main language of
the Irish. This, paradoxically, had a positive effect. The poets began to dig back into the history of the
Irish language. Instead of being frustrated, they were driven furthermore to revive their own language.
The most prominent Irish poet to do so is Thomas Moore. Moore published a book named The Irish
Melodies. His work became greatly welcomed by not only Irish poets but also English poets. It taught
them about lyric poetry and the Irish songs of the past. Heaney wanted to follow their footsteps. His
mission is to express the self, to relate it to the outer world, and to revive the living past. He recognised
that the talented Irish writers were mostly focused on the national problems. Heaney as critics point out
stands out as an international figure among them. He had a very strong influence on his contemporaries
and his influence extends to reach most of the American writers and other European writers. However,
Robert Lowell said that Heaney is the most important Irish poet since Yeats, and that many of his works
are influential to him. Therefore, Heaney was preoccupied with the way he wrote the verse. He knew that
he was combining the past with the present, that he was mixing the Romantic tradition with the post-war
tradition. He was preoccupied with language, the choice of words. He was part of the intellectual
movement of the post-modern age in the way that language is not a transparent medium by which a writer
can express himself, it is a self generating act that expresses the personal of the writer. He attempted to
develop a poetic language in which meaning and sound are intimately related. His poems tend to mirror
the social and cultural divisions in modern Ireland. Heaney's poetry has a traditional dimension, meaning
the tribal strong link with, for instance, James Joyce, and other Irish figures, also his interest in the
cultural field, place names, his treatment of nature, his use of a persona is a traditional trend, and his
frequent allusions to other poets which reflects his awareness of being part of the literary heritage. He has
an interesting quotation saying that: "Much as I would to think of myself as breaking new ground, I find
on looking at what I have done that it is mostly concerned with reclaiming old ground. My intention is to
retrace some of my paths into the ground, to investigate what William Wordsworth called 'the hiding
places." Heaney had a profound experience in his poetry. For him, poetry is a mean of bridging this gap

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that exists between him as a poet and the outer world. There is a sense of loss and guilt that sometimes
echo in his early poems, it's a feeling that controlled him as a young poet. It made him see the distance
between the physical world and the world of language. And he kept trying to bridge this gap, and to dig
out all the words as bearers of history and mystery to recall this physical world, and he succeed. This
countryside in which he was born, gave him actually a very rich material, the roots upon which he wrote
poems as plants fruitful for the young generation, fruitful for the coming generation, and fruitful for the
intellectual community.
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He never forgot his attachment to the land, he said that as a young man and as an elderly person
he never forgot the feeling of slimy weeds in the pond he used to swim in when he was child. He never
forgot this feeling of the sticky water and the slimy little weeds that used to stick onto his feet or arms.
He's not narrating this aimlessly, he is emphasising the strong relation to the homeland.
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The Sense of Place
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He starts his essay by saying that there are 2 way in which a place is known and cherished:
1. the lived one. You know the place and love it because you lived in it, this is an unconscious act.
2. the learned and conscious.
• Both ways co-exist in a tension, and poetry produces this tension between the conscious and the
unconscious. In Gravities, we have examples of the conscious and the unconscious.
• Heaney mentions a very important detail that is in Irish literature, there is a genre includes poems and
tales called “dinnseanchas” devoted to trace the origin of place-names. This genre constitutes a kind of
mythological etymology, because when it races a place-name it could be linked to a Gaelic mythology.
• For the Irish poet, this tracing is very important. They have to be well understood by them in order to
relate to the place more. It has the roots of their identity. If they don’t understand they cannot
communicate with the land.
• Heaney and Montague are accusing the young Irish generation of failing to learn about the Irish
landscape properly. They don’t go deep into the stories to link themselves with their origins.
• He goes on to use a term metaphorically, he say he would love to see a marriage between “the
geographical country” and the “country of the mind.” He uses “marriage” because it’s a symbol union.
He wants a very strong union between the Irish intellectual mind and its land. This example of marriage
is in Follower. The description of the father furrowing the land compared to the verse writing, and the
mapping of the mind of the poet is exactly what he is saying here. The bending of the father on the
ground is like a religious ritual because of respect and love to the land. Here he speaks about the poet
knowing the geographical details about the land in order to be able to speak about it. They have to know
every story that will help the Irish relate to their past in the right manner.
• The metaphorical image isn’t only union and understanding, but also the sacramental relation.
• “the landscape is sacramental instinct with signs implying a system of reality beyond the visible
realities.” By this he is stressing the sensing of the place which is an instinct. The natural, the
instinctive, and the learned are all combined in the human being as the last stanza of Gravities suggests.
When you read your history, you are constructing strings that have gravitational power.

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• The land is their source of living, their memory, their history. There is a shared inheritance between the
land and the human beings. Therefore, this union is important and very strong.
• He introduces an example of W. B. Yeats, he quotes Yeats to show that he is one of the important
contributors of the link between the Irish and his land. He didn’t only speak about it, but he applied it in
his texts. And that he was always referring to Sligo, his birthplace. The Celtic Revival is an Irish
movement that was started by Yeats. It was a cultural movement to be counter-culture to the materialism
that was spreading everywhere. He was looking for literature that will revive the return to the past, to
the legends and fairies in order to bring up to the surface a counter-culture different from the one that is
focusing on materialism and social and political dilemmas. This was a way to make people return to
their past, because by returning to their roots they are becoming independence. Heaney supports this.
• By speaking about their native land, they have a double purpose: [1] they are restoring the Irish
identity , and mythology, and history, [2] the Irish identity, not in a historical sense, but for them as
writers. Their independence.
• Place-names helped Heaney to emphasis this sense of belonging.
• He says: “this idea of mentioning certain places or certain modes of life, has become an Irish
obsession.” Because this is their way of defining themselves and defending their identity. Then he says:
“the Irish literature is a literature that focuses on the local details and the common language of the Irish
people, which has become a phenomenal.”
• He goes own to link the sense of place to other poets starting from Dante. They are not the only ones to
use it, but they’re obsessed with it because they are colonised. They want to free their literature from the
foreign element.
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Digging
1966 
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Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
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Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
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Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
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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.
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By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
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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.
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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.
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Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
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The first poem in his collection The Death of a Naturalist which accumulates the poems of 1968-1978.
Form: irregular rhyme. But there’s a lot of sound effects through alliteration and assonance. The /s/ sound
and the /g/ sound shows the strong relation between sound and sense. He has an interest in stressing the
musicality to reflect the intended meaning.
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Tone: he is speaking in a very proud tone.
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Title: the title is translated into action in the text itself. The poet’s act of writing the poem is actually built
on the act of digging itself. The poem carries you from the present into the past through, the passage of
time, throughout a flashback, to his ancestry that is used symbolically. And then towards the end of the
poem we’re brought to the present once more. The same manner of digging [surface > going deep in and
bringing the gravelly ground on the surface again]. This opposition between past/present, surface/bottom,
helps the poet project his feelings and use the act to symbolise his effort in writing his verse. It’s
symbolic and it’s the major analogy that runs throughout his writings.
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First Stanza: The poem starts with the opening statement the defines the poet’s vision and
mission. How he looks at things and how he decides to tackle these things. Therefore, the statement is
precisely given “Between my finger and my thumb/The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.” A clear
comparison between the pen and gun, which later transforms into a pen/spade comparison. Written with a
slash because they are complementing and alternating.
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He knows he will use the pen both ways; to defend his nation through rewriting the past and
depending on the Irish landscape. Also to attack the reason of oppression, violence, and bloodshed which
is the English ruler.
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Second Stanza: the stanza present the setting of the poem. The poet setting watching outside the
window. The window is symbolic of an outlet that connects the inner with the outer, the mind with the
memory/the past. The stress on “my father” and “digging” is clearly projected on the text by the use of
pauses. The focus is on the father image he draws and the act of digging. “sinks” sound and action that
carries the mind of the listener backwards.
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Third Stanza: the run-on lines show the passage of time backwards. The mind starts to
remember “twenty years away.” The childhood of the persona, when his father digs. The movement of
bending low suggests the effort, and the close relationship between the farmer and the land. This bending
down- in Heaney’s mind- is showing the love and admiration towards the land. It is maybe close to a
religious relationship. The land is their source of living, it’s everything for them.
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He presents the father image not only because he’s a subjective poet who speaks about personal
details. But he chooses this excavation into his life to move outward to the public, his small family is part
of a whole. Therefore, if the ties between them are strong then the society is united. He is defying
divisions by stressing their unity. “Bends low, comes up twenty years away” what comes when the father
bends low is memory stooping into rhythm. “Stooping in rhythm” shows his insistence on drawing a

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strong link between the act of digging to the act of writing poetry. Digging into gravelly ground to bring
up some details is similar to the poet’s act of digging into history, memory, or folklore to record what he
finds out in his verse.
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By returning to the Gaelic mythology and the Irish landscape, there’s also an act of unity since
they all share the same mythology. This element of unity is used by Yeats as well.
Fourth Stanza: detailed description is given to emphasis the professional way with which the
father carries out his job. It is a serious and important action to show professionalism, the seriousness of
the matter, and to prove when an Irishman does a job he does it perfectly, as Heaney aims to do.
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Why the potatoes? It is a typical vegetable in Ireland. Potatoes grow under the surface of the earth.
It’s embedded, buried in the land. They are like the potatoes, they’re part of the land. In order to plant a
new seed, you have to clean the land. It is the same thing that Heaney wants to do. Because he needs to
clean their consciousness of the English pollution in order to start to draw a new bright image of his
nation. In his definition of poetry, he compares poems to plants.
!
Fifth Stanza: The emphasis is to show admiration, respect, of his parents and grandparents. At the
same time, there’s a suggestion of the conflict and worry inside him. “By God, the old man could handle a
spade./Just like his old man.” Old man is an intimate way of speaking. The structure emphasis the
continuity, the strong link from one generation to the other. He also reflecting some worry and inner
conflict because they are alike but where does he stand. As he said “his” to show a distance that they are
not at the same path. He is a young, educated poet. He is starting to realise that he’s not like them. It
worries him whether he’ll be as professional as they are.
!
Sixth Stanza: The image of the grandfather is introduced for several reasons:
(a) the strong family ties which is symbolic of the relations in society at large. We always move from the
private to the public so
(b) it is also introduced to show the unity and the strong link between people in society. Which is
something Heaney would love to have. He suggests it to project the idea in the minds of his people, to
remind them that we should be like that, connected. He is a poet who is bothered by divisions.
Therefore, he emphasises unity because this is how he will save his society. This is how he presents the
ideal society: strong and united.
(c) going to the roots of the past, the Celts, is one way of uniting them because they all belong to that sect,
they have similar background and history. So what unifies them is their past because they cannot
separate themselves from the past. Returning to the past is a unifying element to them.
!
A place name: Toner’s bog. The bog for him is the memory of Ireland. It preserves in it all the
details from the past: cities, bones, fingerprints, etc. He is reviving and reconstructing the history of
Ireland. They have different memories for different districts. The scenery in Ireland is beautiful, so they
admire the land for its beauty, for the preservation of history, for the preservation of stories they learned
from them which shows their variety.

"13
!
His reference to the hardworking grandfather, a man who never wastes time, a professional, is the
same image he is going to introduce about his father in Follower. To say a professional means that his
work is 100% perfect, and he knows his role exactly. “He straightened up/To drink it, then fell to right
away/ Nicking and slicing neatly.”
!
“Going down and down” sound and sense are strongly connected. It is the sound that gives the
impression of the meaning of the word. “Down” long, deep, vowel sound and its slow rhythm agrees with
the act of penetrating deep down in memory. The act that he himself is doing as a poet. There is a
comparison between the speaker and the grandfather who goes deep to bring the good turf. Heaney is
clarifying his mission; that he will not dig out-while reading- any kind of turf, but the good-suitable
information-turf. He reaches the good turf to throw the seeds. Historically: the bad turf is the influenced
by the English. The pure one, however, is the one not ruined and polluted by the colonisation. “Cleaning
the land” from the dead and dry remains. This mission is not easy, it needs someone professional like the
grandfather. So he applies his definition of poetry by using theses comparisons: “a dig for finds that end
up being plants.” The poems are going to be planted in the good soil that will make them grow in the
minds of the young generation. He's feeding the intellect and the soul of his nation.
!
Heaney has a more difficult position than Yeats because: although Yeats lived in the divided
conditions more than Heaney, but Heaney came after Yeats, Shaw, and Joyce whom are giant figures in
the literary world. So what will Heaney do to be distinguished? That is why he is looking for the good and
new turf.
!
Seventh Stanza: The cold smell here does no suggest a cold feeling, it is suggesting freshness,
the fresh smell of potato mould, the squelch, the slap, as you notice the sounds; alliterations and
repetitions of the S sound ( the smell, the squelch, slap, of soggy, curt) When he spoke about the cutting
and the smell and the potato and squelch and soggy peat; there is no full stop, no punctuations, to tell us:
“the curt cuts of an edge/Through living roots awaken in my head.” So, all is actually symbolic of what is
going on in his mind as writer and when he digs and cuts and the turf is turning and the ground and the
layers are preserved in the memory, so as he goes back step by step until the living roots, the healthy ones,
now awaken memories living roots of memories "awaken in my head”. Then we have the sounds which
the critics point out; the sound of hesitation, the sound of fear, of un-experienced young poet “But I’ve no
spade to follow men like them.” Does it really show that he will fear to take a step away from them? It is
simply a reminder, I will consider the line a stop to remind himself that he is moving in different
direction, that his interest is completely different, that he is not a follower of ancestors, but he is a
follower in the sense that he will do the same act in a different field, he follows their responsibly, their
feelings of belonging, their sense of belonging and their protection to the land. He will do the same, but in
different field.Roots for Heaney whenever mentioned in his poetry are fertile toots of a wet land. Roots
are what's keeping him solid In his mission
!
Eighth Stanza: the concluding lines round up the poem and bring us back to the beginning. “I’ll
dig with it.” a reminder that he’ll dig with a pen to defend and attack.

"14
Follower
!
My father worked with a horse-plough,
His shoulders globed like a full sail strung
Between the shafts and the furrow.
The horse strained at his clicking tongue.
!
!
!
An expert. He would set the wing
And ﬁt the bright steel-pointed sock.
The sod rolled over without breaking.
At the headrig, with a single pluck
!
!
!
Of reins, the sweating team turned round
And back into the land. His eye
Narrowed and angled at the ground,
Mapping the furrow exactly.
!
!
!
I stumbled in his hob-nailed wake,
Fell sometimes on the polished sod;
Sometimes he rode me on his back
Dipping and rising to his plod.
!
!
!
I wanted to grow up and plough,
To close one eye, stiffen my arm.
All I ever did was follow
In his broad shadow round the farm.
!
!
I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,
Yapping always. But today
It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away.
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!

"15
Title
!

He chose this title because it suggests different meanings. It could be simply a follower of the
ancestry, his ancestry could be either his personal life and his literary career. The poem is presented in
personal note reflecting the persona's admiration of the symbolic figure of a father. A father image is
drawn to represent the ancestry of the modern Irish. They were planters, ploughmen, and farmers. He
chose a figure that is known for all the Irish people since Ireland is an agricultural country. It raises the
question of whether he's going to follow them, whether he'll become a leading figure and therefore change
what has been destroyed and ruined before, so he'll be the leading figure and they'll become the followers.
!
Who is the follower?
!

The title is suggestive. He's a poet who speaks about following the footsteps of the ancestry. And
the ancestry could be his personal ancestry or the literary figures. In both cases, Heaney is going to follow
them, or he's going to present a different new image as he does, or is he going to imitate the literary
figures, or is he going to be in the forefront doing something different and they become in the back.
!
Form
!

The poem is divided into two parts. It consists of 6 quatrains that are divided into two parts. The
first 3 are introductory describing the giant image of the father, the expert worker. The other 3 shift the
focus on the psychological inner feelings of the speaker. It has a development from remembering early
childhood to progressing to today, the present time when he's a mature man.
!
How did he describe the father?
!

"My father" he starts with the emphasis on the personal note because this is his adopted strategy.
That his poetry is self revelation, that his own personal experience and feelings that inspire him. Which
will excite the reader. He's creating an image of intimate feelings, "My father" the possessive gives a
sense of belonging. The father isn't only a man with a giant body, but he's a strong man who controls the
fields.
!

The comparison in "His shoulders globed like a full sail strung Between the shafts and the
furrow," show not only love and admiration, and respect. But wonder and amazement to a figure whom
he'll never forget. The father uses a horse-plough and "The horse strained at his clicking tongue." The
horse respond to a simple click of a tongue, either to stop, or to move, or to turn around. They are trained,
and a man who trains his horses to respond to a click of a tongue is a clever trainer who controls his
animals. These details aren't only for the show of admiration to the work done, but also it's a part of
drawing the perfect picture of the Irish worker which every Irish man would be proud of.
!

"An expert." Written alone for emphasis. The literature of colonised countries always show two
types of discourses, description of the people who are trying to defend their country, and reclaim their
identity which we get from Heaney. The other discourse which is written by the colonisers which
represents the colonised as uncivilised people who need help. Heaney is aware of that and aware that the
problem is not resolved yet. So he reconstruct the image of his own ancestry.
!

"He would set the wing/And fit the bright steel-pointed sock." These details are given to emphasis
the word "an expert." The preparation are explained step by step. "The sod rolled over without breaking"
shows the continuity of action in smoothness. And to move smoothly means there're no obstacles, that
you know your way, you don't stumble. "At the headrig, with a single pluck/Of reins, the sweating team
turned round/And back into the land." This lines connotes several suggestions. We said that the first 3
quatrains are a description of the giant Irish worker, here, he's injecting the idea of writing poetry
comparing it with ploughing the land. Why and How? He does it through the description of the action.

"16
Farmers furrow the land by dividing it into lines so they can throw the seeds moving with the horses
starting from the headring to the end and go back to start again. Verse of poetry is made of lines. And the
word "verse" is originally Latin "versus" that means furrowing. It became then a word for writing poetry.
Therefore, Heaney's description of this action showing that it's a hard task to accomplish, he's pointing
that he as a poet has a difficult task to do and he wishes to perfect his work like that expert. The word
"team" shows unity, meaning that you can't do it alone, it's a "sweating team" work.
!

"His eye /Narrowed and angled at the ground, Mapping the furrow exactly." Another detail is
injected by the poet to emphasis the knowledge, the perfection, and the exactness in doing the job. He
narrowed his eyes to focus, to see the land in a sharp exact manner, to know it exactly, as if he's studying
the land for wanting to perfect his job. Heaney is bringing up these details wishing to be like that persona,
perfect, knowing every detail in his field. Which is an application of his definition of his poems as
elements of continuity that will turn up to be plants. So even in his essays, he's always comparing his
poetry to plants. "Mapping," is a study of every detail, every single line, every single colour is indicative.
"Mapping" suggests exactness, knowing particular details of every dimension. This perfection makes an
expert.
!
Second Part
!

The second part shifts to a lower tone, after the loud one at the beginning that is filled with a sense
of pride and assurance. "I stumbled in his hob-nailed wake, Fell sometimes on the polished sod;" Heaney
shifts to his psychological inner feelings, digging in his childhood memory. He stumbled not knowing the
way, he fell because he wasn't a mature controller. "Sometimes he rode me on his back/Dipping and rising
to his plod." It's symbolic of a speaker needs guidance and help, who depends on somebody else. "dipping
and rising" changes in times, in moods, in understanding. It's all "his," the father's. It's an early stage of
Heaney's conflict when he was a child and young poet, he was hesitant.
!

"I wanted to grow up and plough," The wish is expressed clearly. The tone of pride, and wonder,
and amazement with that figure links us with the same feeling "By God, the old man could handle a
spade. Just like his old man." from Digging. But there's also a fear. "To close one eye, stiffen my arm." He
chose the closing of the eye because it's the vision of the poet, the knowledge he has, and a reflection of
the mind. To close one eye and focus on the exact details, to find the pure soil, the good turf, where he'll
throw the seeds to turn out healthy plants. "Stiffen my arm," to have control on the material he has. "All I
ever did was follow." He still has this low tone, the poet is expressing the beginning, the first step he took
to grow and become like that ploughman. Up to the fifth stanza, he's not yet learned his lesson perfectly,
he's not yet become the mature professional one. He was still a follower of others, Irish writers. "In his
broad shadow round the farm." Heaney describes it as a broad shadow because he's a giant figure. I's not
an easy task to move away from that shadow, it takes time and effort. He needs to be an expert t walk
away from that shadow, to be different.
!

"I was a nuisance, tripping, falling, Yapping always." He wasn't satisfied with what he was doing.
"But today," he takes us to the present time, so the tripping, falling, and yapping took place before he
started writing the text. The poem is published in his first collection, so "today" is when he started writing
as a young man. "It is my father who keeps stumbling /Behind me, and will not go away." This is what's
happening today. He's the leader but he can't let it go, he keeps remembering his father. He'll never forget
his memories. Stumbling here is different from the first stumbling. The first is not knowing the way,
unexperienced. The second is coming in the way, obstructing the way, meaning that the memory of the
father constantly crosses his mind and will never go away. It's the source of his inspiration and
information.
!

"17
Gravities
1966
!
High-riding kites appear to range quite freely
Though reined by strings, strict and invisible.
The pigeon that deserts you suddenly 
Is heading home, instinctively faithful.
!
Lovers with barrages of hot insult 
Often cut of their nose to spite their face,
Endure a hopeless day, declare their guilt,
Re-enter the native port of their embrace.
!
!
Blinding in Paris, for his party-piece 
Joyce named the shops along O'Connell Street
And on Iona Colmcille sought ease 
By wearing Irish mould next to his feet.
!
!

"18
In Digging, Personal Helicon, and Follower, we had a lot of commonalities that point out Heaney’s style
and strategy as a writer:
1. the analogy of digging is very clear elaborated and projected through the different scenes and different
examples. Starting with digging in his memory to bring out images of ancestry: symbolised in the
father and grandfather in Digging, and as the giant figure of the father in Follower, and a projection of
the other meaning of ancestry which are the tradition and the literary figures of the past which he will
not follow or imitate in his writing.
2. In the three texts we don’t have the act of digging into the past, but a combination of past-present-
future anticipation.
3. The poet defines his mission in Digging, so he’s going to write with a pen instead of using a gun and
spade. To dig deep into the origins and the roots.
4. In the comparison between the week and the well of the self, there’s a personal revelation for a poet
who wants to decide his way in the future, and the next step will be “to set the darkness
echoing.” [explain darkness and how it will echo in his poetry].
5. the background of the three text was the land. It’s the source of different images, it’s used
symbolically to emphasis the sense of belonging and the identity of the poet, naming certain places-
Toner’s bog-.
6. He is always depicting the environment in Ireland following Yeats’s footsteps in using place names.
Therefore, we have to link these poems and Gravities to his essay The Sense of Place.
!
The poem has a similar meaning of the gravitational power which is part of the land. The force that pulls
writers to their land and connects them tightly to their origins.
!
TITLE
Heaney is interested in the gravitational power, which is a strong force that has all these qualities:
seen and unseen, natural or leaned, innate or adopted. They are all constituents of gravity. Different
GRAVITIES, examples of different sources. He poetically exemplifies the force that pulls man to his
homeland.
!
FIRST STANZA
• there are two examples the kites and the pigeon. The “kites appear” to fly freely but they are controlled
by “strict and invisible” strings. The other example is the pigeon which is controlled and directed by
instinct. The former is an object and the latter is a living creature. Both are controlled, the former is an
artificial control and the latter is a natural, innate quality. In either cases, we have strong tie that pulls
and directs them home. Therefore, heading home is very important because the home is the sense of
belonging, a place of shelter, a place that you know very well, and you choose it because it’s a place that
gives you comfort, security, safety, love, and protection. Therefore, you instinctively go home, a place
that always take you in when you return. The “return” is important for Heaney in this text. The term
“desert” in the third line is important because you can desert a place and fly a distance, but all of the
sudden when you have this feeling of wanting to return home, that home will take you back. It has to
take you in because there lies your sense of belonging. This feeling extends in the picture of the lovers
in the following stanza.
• The stanza opens of the hight of the kites suggesting their separation from the earth. But there’s still a
force pulling them down.
• The strings are symbolic of the historical roots and the obligations of the ancestry. Invisible, but they
are there.

"19
• But there is also a natural, unconscious force that pulls man back to his homeland.
!
SECOND STANZA
• In the first two examples there was an object and a living creature. In this third example, he introduces
lovers, humans, and they share a feeling of love. This love is compared to the bird’s feeling which
makes an unconscious link to their home. The power of love is compared to the power of gravity. They
both pull back. Despite the lovers quarrels and fights, they can endure and bare this suffering. The
strong feeling of love makes them tolerate the obstacles. Love always pulls them back to “the native
port of their embrace.” “Native” shows the same meaning as “heading home.” It connotes the same
meaning which is the return to the harbour of safety. They are all powerful forces that are invisible,
conscious or unconscious: strings, instinct, gravity, and love. They guide, protect, and pull back.
• He talks about overcoming obstacles with the tone of an Irishman who has problems with his country.
But his love to his country may help him overcome these problems and return to his homeland. He will
endure any suffering because he loves his native land.
!
THIRD STANZA
• He poetically exemplifies the force that pulls man to his homeland, this is understood because he
concludes with an example from the literary field. The two introductory stanzas are universal and
applicable to kite, any pigeon, any lover. They are not personal or private to him as an Irish poet. He
introduces James Joyce for two reasons: his respect and admiration to the Irish writer James Joyce. And
because he’s one of many Irish literary figures who left Dublin to live Paris or the US. And they were
speaking as poets of exile. The sense of separation from their homeland is dominant in their writing.
Joyce was one of many who were attacked by critics for neglecting or marginalising the Irish cause;
which turned out to be a misreading of his works. Therefore, he never slough off the Irish skin. He
never neglected the Irish cause, he departed like the kite and the pigeon, but he always return through
his writing to his homeland using place-names, natural scenery, individual sufferings, and other details.
• Joyce is a typical Irish representative. Therefore, Heaney is trying to quote an example-which is Joyce-
as an outstanding literary figure who traveled abroad but never really separated himself from the strings
and ties that link him with his country. how did Heaney present him?
• how did Heaney present him? In Paris, Joyce met Irish figures and he was looking for them. He used to
enjoy sitting with them, and exchanging notes about Ireland, and what is happening in it, and reviving
the memory about Ireland. So he lived in Paris, but never forgot about his homeland.
• “O'Connell Street” and “Iona Colmcille” are Irish place-names mentioned to emphasis the link between
Joyce and Ireland. He is a man who never separated himself from his land.
• The final image stresses this idea “By wearing Irish mould next to his feet.” The image tells a strong
connection between him and his land. This is the image Heaney wants to draw about Irish writers, he is
defending Irish writers through the symbol of Joyce. The Irish writers “appear” to us as living away
like the kites “appear” as flying away. The image is that they are living there, but their minds and their
hearts are attached to their homeland. They are not to be judged by appearance. Many elements pull
them back, psychologically, mentally, intellectually, emotionally.
• The poem presents a very paradoxical image: it starts with the kites flying up high symbolising the
traveling and the distance in any Irish writer who travels abroad in search for freedom as the word

"20
“freely” indicates. At the same time, that traveling pulls them back to their country where their feet are
stuck to the ground.
• This sublime distance between the kites and the feet is showing the sublime relation between those
travellers and their country.
• This strong sense of belonging is the image he wants to draw about the Irish people. This is how he’s
defending the Irish nation. Their travelings does not mean that they forgot their country. There is a
strong link that makes them always speak about their Irish background and the Irish cause.
• The gravitational power is his love to his country as he names Ireland in the closing line.
• The last stanza stresses his identity as an Irish speaker.
!
!
!

"21
Personal Helicon
!
As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses. 
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.
!
One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope. 
So deep you saw no reflection in it.
!
A shallow one under a dry stone ditch 
Fructified like any aquarium. 
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.
!
Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one 
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.
!
Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime, 
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme 
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
!
!

!
!
!
!
!

"22

The concluding poem of the first collection. It sums up the themes mentioned in the earlier poems.
The poem takes us to the last stage of the first act of digging, the last layer which is the water. His own
spring of poetry; self-discovery. It is important for him to know his role and what he’ll do in the future.
This poem agrees with Heaney’s definition of poetry as a self revelation.
!

On Helicon, was the spring where Narcissus was inspired by his own beauty. When Heaney says
in the title “Personal Helicon” he suggests that the self is his own product, that he’s going to understand
the self first.
!

Later in the text when says "Others had echoes" meaning the echoes of early writings of poetry. It
links us to Sidney in the 16th C. Poetry, Yeats and Heaney believed, is a product of earlier writings.
Poems are plants and the roots are the earlier writings. Past and future are directly connected, you cannot
produce a new poem without knowing what has already been introduced. In “Astrophel and Stella”
Sidney kept looking in books for suitable words. In the final couplet, the muse tells him to find the
suitable terms in his heart: “look in thy heart and write.” If there’s a sincere strong feeling of wanting to
say something, say it your own way. And this is the mission of any good poet as Heaney did when he
found the fountain springing from inside.
!

In his essays, Heaney compares the springing of fountains and wells to the production of a poem.
So he chose this title to emphasis all this, that poetry comes from inside, a product of his own perception
of things.
!
Wells
!

The poem opens with a memory from the past, as a child. His love and admiration for wells, his
strong connection with the land. He chooses wells because they're dug into the land and they're part of the
Irish landscape, like the potatoes. The largest number of wells around the world are found in Ireland.
They live on the water brought from wells. Therefore, bringing such a symbol into the text is a selection
of a familiar part of their culture and nature. It's a also symbolic of the dig within. The interest in
penetrating the psych of man is very common in a post-modern writer. Heaney lived in the same era with
Lacan, Freud, Jung. In his essays, Heaney compares the springing of fountains and wells to the
production of a poem. Wells, additionally, symbolise reaching the final end, the mirror of the self, which
is an element in psychoanalysis. The inner mirror of defining the self, and defining the mission of it. For
all these reasons, wells become a very successful choice.
!
Strata
!
"Old pumps with buckets and windlasses" the whole scene gives a realistic sense of bringing out the
water. He uses these tools to bring out results that he's going to project later in the text. Digging the wells
is digging a land of different strata containing details of history like remains and footsteps. So he's
discovering through each layer a different type of knowledge, information, different features of the past
{readings}. And as he says it becomes like an aquarium in front of him. Until he reaches the last layer
where he can clearly see himself as a poet and how he's going to master all this and control it.
!
Fear
!
Fear of darkness + fear of failing
!

There's a strong connection not only as a poet to the wells but also as a child. This reflects his
sense of belonging. He's a poet that doesn't separate himself from his childhood, and his strong
connection to the land. So Heaney never separates himself from the land (sticky waterweed). "I loved the
dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells/Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss." There is a contradiction
here. The image is ugly of darkness, fungus, dank moss, smells of waterweed, a running rat. Yet, he

"23
LOVES it. What he really loves is the memory of the past, even the smell. There's a crossing of any
limitation. He's not a self-centred poet, because in his inner self trapped the sky, he's enlarging the
knowledge he have. There's a sublime image of the sky of infinite dimensions. So he has a wide scope of
knowledge. Critics said that the scaresome words suggest a sense of fear that overwhelms the poem. That
the speaker is still struggling to fulfil his aim, he's not yet standing on a solid ground. It's the fear of
penetrating into this darkness. Darkness for him is all the unknown including the hidden self, the hidden
history, hidden details about his tradition, a lot of details are still unknown to him. This kind of ignorance
is scaresome because he doesn't know if what he'll find out is going to be satisfactory to him. In
succeeding to fulfil the mission, there's a fear of failing to reach the good turf, the details that will help
him reconstruct the Irish image in the proper manner.
!
Two Directions
!

"One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.I savoured the rich crash when a bucket/Plummeted
down at the end of a rope. So deep you saw no reflection in it." Again, the depth, the distance in time and
space, the details that are uncovered yet, he doesn't see. The bucket and the rope are symbolic of his trials
to dig back in his memory, his trial to excavate the historical books and literary material. But still in that
level, there are things he doesn't see. We have two different directions moving within that well:
psychologically, the persona and the inner self,digging in his memory. And as a poet digging in past
history and readings. For the former, the vision isn't clear because he still in the early layers, he cannot
identify what he want as a poet "So deep you saw no reflection in it." In the latter, the bucket symbolises
his readings, his exploration, he still didn't reach the good turf. But he's happy with "the rich crash" of the
bucket which connotes that it hit something. Meaning that he came across something important. The
"rope" is the memory, the series of information, the sense of time carrying him back.
!

"A shallow one under a dry stone ditch/Fructified like any aquarium.When you dragged out long
roots from the soft mulch/A white face hovered over the bottom." The white face isn't identified yet. But
he starts at this level to uncover features of the self, of his identity as an Irish man. So the poem sums up
the development in the poems in the collection, layer by layer. He's a man who spoke about his childhood
"Digging, then in "Follower" addresses the image of a young boy admiring his father, and in "Gravities"
he mentions Joyce which shows his interest in the readings of others. And then he reaches an
identification of what he should do as a poet, the Narcissus stage which he'll not accept, he discovered
himself and what he wants but he's not a narcissus which shows that he's a mature poet now.
!

"Others had echoes, gave back your own call With a clean new music in it. And one/Was
scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall/Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection." Any text is a
product of a previous text which is Yeats' definition that is followed by Heaney. This is what Eliot has
proved in The Waste Land which is like a tissue that combines different texts together. Therefore, this is
what Heaney said that he reads, he echoes the voices of other and others echo different voices. But it
depends on the new music, the new combination, how the ideas will be shaped in a new manner. It's the
form that makes all the difference because the meaning should be presented a novelty, people look at it
differently, they see angles they never saw before. So he'll not imitate, but he may echo which is a
continues cycle as others do echo others. "Clean new music" that has no traces of influence, as he cleans
the land of the dead roots. "Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall/Foxgloves, a rat slapped across
my reflection." At the end of this quatrain we see that he's speaking about his personal reflection. There
sense of fear is present again, the rat crossing the water caused a blurred vision, unclear, hazy. This lack
of clarity and sense of fear of figures that may appear and make him doubt his capability as a writer, and
his his ability to be a representative poet. Whenever he writes, until he dies, he complains about this
feeling of hesitance, whether he fulfilled his mission or not.
!

The poem is a dig in the time as well as in the self and in history. "Now, to pry into roots, to finger
slime,To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme/To see myself, to
set the darkness echoing." The dig carries us through different layers and brings us to the surface, like in

"24
"Digging" but with the use of a bucket instead of the spade. The quatrain starts with "Now" bringing us
to the present. "to pry into root" which are essential to his plants, his poems. "To finger slime," to feel
them as in the title of his essay. For him, he has to feel every word he says that's why it's a personal
helicon. His poetry is felt by him. "I rhyme/To see myself, to set the darkness echoing." The mission is
clarified in these final lines. He writes his verse to uncover the self which he did in The Death of a
Naturalist and will continue in the next two collection that contain a lot of his childhood memories. They
are used strategically to attract the reader. Hw writes also to reconstruct the Irish image.
!

He mentions Narcissus at the end because he wants to define his role as a poet, he's answering
critics who accused him of being a Romantic escapist, to say that he's not admiring himself but only
knowing it to be able to represent the nation. A quest into the self to uncover his belonging, his relation to
the land, his love for his country. And the poems in the first collection prove that.
!
Form
!

Regular stanza and organised rhyme scheme because he reaches a settlement. The harmony in the
text projects the harmony inside Heaney. Although there's some fear, still there is the satisfactory of
knowing what he'll do next by opening the door of the dark. The poem is divided into quatrains with
alternative rhymes. It reflects the steps of going down in layers as the well mentioned in the opening lines
and the water appears at the end.
!

"25
!
Midnight
1972
!
!
Since the professional wars -
Corpse and carrion
Plaing in rain -
The wolf has died out
!
!
!
In Ireland. The packs
Scoured parkland and moor
Till a Quaker buck and his dogs
Killed the last one
!
!
!
In some scraggy waste of Kildare.
The wolfhound was crossed
With inferior strains,
Forests coopered to wine casks.
!
!
!
Rain on the roof to-night
Sogs turf-banks and heather,
Sets glinting outcrops
Of basalt and granite,
!
!
!
Drips to the moss of bare boughs.
The old dens are soaking.
The pads are lost or
Retrieved by a small vermin
!
!
!
That glisten and scut.
Nothing is panting, lolling,
Vapouring. The tongue's
Leashed in my throat.

"26

The title of the poem suggests the darkness that overwhelmed the context. The poem was
published in the third collection Wintering Out in 1972. The primacy of culture preface of culture and
political topics is increasingly clear in that volume more than the first two. It marks a change from the two
first collections because in the first two, he did touch on cultural background and political details, but not
in the same manner as in his third collection. The first two collection focus more on domestic family life,
local place names, literary figures, the mission of the poet, they point out the relation of the land to its
people, and cultural background and many details that are dug out of history. In the third collection there's
an addition of more focus on political topics and cultural background. Although the poem is divided into
two parts, the first focuses on general political issues, the second is also focuses on family and domestic
relations between members of society, and different figures from Ireland. So he continues to explore the
Irish culture both downward and inward into the bogland details.
!

This poem tackles themes and ideas that already have been covered in the early poems. It also
tackles problems that had been tackled in the general introduction to Heaney. Therefore, in his text there's
a focus on divisions in that he loved as a poet representing a post-colonial literature, the voice of a nation
that has been colonised for hundreds of years. The division of language, religious, geographical, names,
and place names, loyalties, cultural , historical background divisions. Beside the psychological inner
divisions within the man himself which always cause trouble and restlessness amongst post-colonial poets
who lived the double-consciousness. In the poem such divisions are emphasised.
!
Anahorish
!

When he was in primary school he lived in a Northern Irish town called "Anahorish." Anahorish is
an Irish name which he uses in many poems. The name Anahorish is translated from the Irish, anach fhior
uisce, means 'place of clear water' - a phrase used in the opening line of the poem.It refers to in many of
his writings. That school combined Catholic and Protestant students. This school was the only one that
had Catholic and Protestant students.It's important because it is the first time to personally experience and
become aware of differences religions. This aspect has been tackled by many critics who said the this
point has been articulated in Heaney's poetry in a very innocent simple manner because he wasn't trying
to create a barrier between himself and the English society. As a poet he didn't try to separate himself
from the English society. He simply points out some facts that used to happen and nobody can deny them.
He didn't go on attacking the English for no reason, he has a way that appears to be acceptable by every
reader. This experience is recorded here in Midnight when he chose the clash between the Catholics and
the Protestants.
!
Language
!
Midnight, Traditions and A new songs in those three poems in the third collection, the problem of
language divisions and suppression is highlighted. As it's here by the leashing of the tongue.
!

The closing lines of the poem mark that division of language, "the tongue is leashed in my throat."
The words are stuck in his throat, he's chocked by them, implying that during the English rule the Gaelic
language has been destroyed and forgotten. Heaney learned Latin, French, English, Gaelic, and was
interested in translation. He translated Beowulf although it was translated several times. So he likes to
trace the origins of every detail he dealt with. So the idea of going back to the native Irish tongue is
something that bothered him. He's aware that Irishmen aren't speaking their language, they speak the
language of their coloniser. This irritated him making his tongue become leashed in the throat. Another
reason of his tongue being leashed is the loss of the Irish identity. Why is he constrained by a language
that doesn't represent him, the same as when we speak in English but use the Arabic language to express
ourselves purely and genuinely.
!
!
!

"27
Post-colonialism
!
The poem shows the solidity of the Irish facing all of that
!

He starts the poem by carrying us back in time, digging in the history of the Irish nation in order to
surface a detail that will refresh the memory of the contemporary generations. So they would know that
they have to remain solid and strong to defend their identity and to defend their land. So the idea of
digging is recurrent in his texts. This is the same analogy used in pervious poems. A post-colonial poet is
a poet who has to reclaim his land, and his identity. And this is what Heaney is trying to do in his poems.
!
Title
!

The title indicates the darkness that overwhelms the whole situation. But he doesn't say night nor
darkness. He chooses a time that marks the in betweens, a midway, in the middle of the night we hope for
a change to come. All the different images are chosen to show the cruelty, and the darkness that
overwhelms Ireland. Yet, the time of change will soon come. Midnight also is the in between, a divisions
they live in. The middle of divided interests, aims, languages and religions.
!
Hybridity
!

He carries us into the past bringing a historical detail metaphorically and symbolically in the
image of the wolf. The choice of the wolf is made for several reasons: it represents the animal spirit of
Ireland, the identity of the Irish. But how does he introduce the wolf? As a dying or an already died out
breed because it was attacked by another breed, the English. Here he's showing the inﬂuence of the
mixture, the hybridity. We have a new breed, but the original one, the wolf-like one is destroyed like the
Irish identity. His task is to communicate that identity. He's communicating it in a paradoxical nature,
because it is written in English yet he's defending this own language and identity. When he says the wolf
has died out in Ireland, he's projecting the Irish identity in all its aspects. It has been replaced by an
inferior race, stray. The Irish are robbed of its own voice or identity as their language was banned during
the colonial stage. Like the haunting dogs when they attack their pray. That's how he speaks of the
English coloniser represented by "Quaker buck " and his dogs. "Till a Quaker buck and his dogs/ Killed
the last one/In some scraggy waste of Kildare. The wolfhound was crossed/With inferior strains, Forests
coopered to wine casks." This is the invasion, the destruction. The Quaker buck is a typical representative
of the English upper classes with their hunting dogs. Natural images that represent every day experiences
and lifestyles of both the Irish and English, therefore both sides are able to relate to the poem.
!
Place-names
!

Mentioning Ireland and Kildare are place names, identifying himself as an Irish poet. Kildare now
is a "scraggy waste," but in the past it was very lively county. So he's showing changes. The land has been
attacked and ripped off its innocence and beauty. Even the forests that used to be rich and healthy are now
"coopered to wine casks." They are destroyed.
!
Images
!

He carries the readers to the professional wars ear that lead to nothing but destruction. The "corps
and carrions" and "rain" are suggestive of more that one meaning, the anger, restlessness, disturbance,
conﬂicts, unsettlement of the Irish environment. Additionally, it's keeping the land fertile.
!

"Rain on the roof to-night" rain is a recurrent image in this poem functioning in more than one
manner and suggesting more than one meaning. What is lest of Ireland is still strong. So the rain functions
as a symbol of life and fertility. "the roof" suggests the human life and design within these houses. The
rain helps "Sogs turf-banks and heather," which Heaney usually use as images of fertility. But the rain is

"28
also a sign of anger, the stormy weather of restlessness and the rain falls as he describes on dead bodies. It
is destructive, representing aggression and the war. Among all this there's "Basalt and granite" as images
of strength, the solidity borrowed from the land. The solidity of the land is important because it will take
all this in and still challenge and continue, it will not be destroyed.
!

But "The old dens are soaking. The pads are lost or/ Retrieved by a small vermin" which shows
destruction, formlessness, nothing but there remains. But it's there. Not gone. It'll continue to challenge.
!
Wolf
!

The "Wolfhound" is common in the Irish forests, he's been crossed with inferior strains which
shows the hybridity. The original breed of the wolfhound is changed. The choice of the wolf is due to the
Irish natural scenery and the name of one the Irish leaders who sacrificed his life to defend the Irish cause.
His name was Wolfe Tom. He was a famous figure in Ireland and in the Irish history. He died towards the
end of the 18th C, so he's digging in history. The collection poems were written in a very awkward time
of religious clash which provoked him to write this poem. It is normal for his poetry to project what's
going on in his life at that current time and remembering how it used to be in his childhood. This Quaker
killer is like the Protestants who try to attack the Catholics.
!

Wolfe Tom was an Irish fighter who was assisted even by the French against the English. But
unfortunately he was sentenced to death. He committed suicide before they hung him because he knew
he'll not have a fair trial. So the wolf that has died out is a combination of several suggestions. Whether
identifying the Irish through the natural animal that's significant among Irish animals, or suggests the Irish
leader whom sacrificed his life for the cause. Both express the cruelty Irishmen bared under the English
rule.
!
CONTEXTUAL ANALYSIS: refer the poem back to its origin and to why and when it was written
before you comment on the lines.
!

File on Seamus Heaney

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