Digging an absolutely powerful Irish poem. Once again, we see the great Seamus Heaney in the top 100 Irish poems list. And it is no wonder. This poem comes in at number 18 on the list of the top poems. And I also just featured it on my top Seamus Heaney’s poems lists.

I also found a great video of Heaney reading the poem a few years before he passed away. You can find it further down the page. Irish poet Seamus Heaney, the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1995 and one of the 20th century’s greatest poets, died aged 74.

If you didn’t know, when Heaney refers to his father digging “turf”, he’s not talking about grass. Turf is the colloquial name for peat which was the principal fuel in many rural Irish homes burnt on an open fire.

Who was Seamus Heaney?

Born on a farm in Northern Ireland, Seamus Heaney received a scholarship and left his family at age 12. A widely-read and accessible poet, Heaney’s subject matter often remains with his roots—rural life in Ireland. Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 and was formerly named the prestigious Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard.

Here are a few thoughts on this lovely and touching Irish poem

Digging

BY SEAMUS HEANEY

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

Digging is the poem that opens Death of a Naturalist, Heaney’s first full collection, published by Faber in 1966. He wrote it in the summer of 1964. He later said it was the first poem in which he felt he had truly got his feelings into words.

The poet sits writing at his window and hears his father digging in the garden below. The sound carries him back to his father working the potato drills years before, and further back again to his grandfather cutting turf on the bog. Both men were masters of the spade, and the young Heaney watched them with real pride.

The memories come alive through the senses, the smell and feel of the earth and the peat. Heaney admires these men, but he knows he will never follow them into that work. So he makes writing his own kind of digging, a way of going down into memory, family and the ground he came from. The pen that seemed almost like a weapon at the start becomes his tool.

Read the full poem: Digging by Seamus Heaney at the Poetry Foundation. You will also find it in Death of a Naturalist (Faber & Faber).

Here is Seamus Heaney giving a reading of his poem, “Digging”, at Villanova University in April 2010.nbsp;