RIP Seamus Heaney

Digging by Seamus Heaney from Death of a Naturalist (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Between my finger and my thumb   The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

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

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

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

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

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

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
Seamus Heaney taught me to write poetry. Well, actually George O'Brien taught me to write poetry, with the help of the above poem by Heaney.  It was during an Irish literature class Professor O'Brien taught at Georgetown University as part of the Liberal Studies graduate program.  We read Yeats and Joyce, of course, then Kavanagh and Kinsella, and finally Seamus Heaney.  As Professor O'Brien unpacked this poem that, on one level, is about the very act of writing poetry, he showed us how the images, rhyme structure, diction, and form all work together to create a perfect poem.  I can honestly say it was a miracle worker moment for me.  Like Helen Keller at the pump associating the letters being spelled out on her palm with the word water, I realized that it was more than just a loose association of words on a page that equaled poetry.

The sad thing was, I had spent many years writing poetry.  Just the year before, I'd taken a poetry writing class at that same university, albeit with a different instructor.  In that class, we started out with free writing using Peter Elbow's book, Writing with Power, and then jumped straight into the deep end of the poetry pool, bringing in our poems for group critique, which was the bulk of the class.  No lessons in between to teach us the rhythm or breath or stroke-- it was sink or swim and naturally we all sank.

Likewise, I'm sure I studied poetry in high school, but I don't really recall learning what makes a poem a poem.  In one assignment we had to choose a poem, memorize it, and write a paper about it.  The paper wasn't as much about the poem itself, rather about the literary criticism associated with the poem.  I think the only reason I remember that assignment is because we were supposed to go to the Library of Congress to do the research.  My father dropped me off at the Library and I spent my allotted hour lost in the back stairwells, never actually making it to any books.  In the end, I went to my local library and picked Carl Sandburg's "Chicago," not because I particularly liked the poem but because there were two books of poetry criticism that referenced the poem and I figured that was good enough to simulate the resources available at the Library of Congress.  Oh-- and then there was the time we had to pick a poem and do an interpretive reading as a group.  I convinced our group that The Cremation of Sam McGee would likely earn us, if not an A, at least a few laughs from our classmates.  It did both.  

Yet during all those years of oblivion as to what poetry actually entailed, I continued to write poems, often inspired by the worksI devoured in elementary school-- namely various books of limericks and the collected canon of Shel Silverstein.  My poems probably weren't too bad for a 5 year old but for a 25 year old, they sucked.  And I finally knew why.  

So it was during that Irish literature class at Georgetown that I decided to stop writing poetry and started reading poetry instead. If one Seamus Heaney poem provided such insight, no doubt there was a lot more I could learn from reading other great poems.  To the mix of the Irish poets I read in class I added others from the British Isles:  the old guard of Shelley, Keats, Blake, Byron and the Brownings along with Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot, and the dreamy Rupert Brooke.  I discovered an anthology of contemporary poets by Blood Axe Books and started reading poets who were actually alive and some of whom were around my age.  And when I did start writing poetry again, I found it was much better.  Not great, often not even good, but definitely better.  

So thank you Seamus Heaney, for teaching me to write poetry.  You illumined so many lives.  May light perpetual shine upon you.

Heaney reading "Digging" at Villanove courtesy of the WSJ online