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.
| Heaney's comments on the poem | Critical commentary |
Is wooed into the cyclops' eye
Of a tarn. Our unfenced country
Is bog that keeps crusting
Between the sights of the sun.
They've taken the skeleton
Of the Great Irish Elk
Out of the peat, set it up,
An astounding crate full of air.
Butter sunk under
More than a hundred years
Was recovered salty and white.
The ground itself is kind, black butter
Melting and opening underfoot,
Missing its last definition
By millions of years.
They'll never dig coal here,
Only the waterlogged trunks
Of great furs, soft as pulp.
Our pioneers keep striking
Inwards and downwards,
Every layer they strip
Seems camped on before.
The bogholes might be Atlantinc seepage.
The wet centre is bottomless.
Published in Door into the Dark (1969)
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From all the birds' eggs in
All the nests of spring
Were spiked and hung
Everywhere on bushes to ripen.
Hills oxidize gold.
Above the smoulder of green shoot
And dross of dead thorns underfoot
The blossoms scald.
Put a match under
Whins, they go up of a sudden.
They make no flame in the sun
But a fierce heat tremor
Yet incineration like that
Only takes the thorn--
The tough sticks don't burn,
Remain like bone, charred horn.
Gilt, jaggy, springy, frilled,
This stunted, dry richness
Persists on hills, near stone ditches,
Over flint bed and battlefield.
Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked
On sods, their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
The slap and plot were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.
Published in Death of a Naturalist (1966)
In Ireland the peat bogs are sliced in layers; the peat is used to heat people's homes. In "Digging" Heaney notes that his grandfather was a turfcutter, one who cuts the peat. The poem "Bogland" further describes the bogs and begins to make associations with Irish history.
| "Bogland" | "Punishment" | "The Tollund Man" | "Tollund" |
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In the flat country nearby
Where they dug him out.
His last gruel of winter seeds
Caked in his stomach.
Naked except for
The cap, noose and girdle.
I will stand a long time.
Bridegroom to the goddess.
She tightened her torc on him
And opened her fen.
Those dark juices working
Him to a saints's kept body.
Trove of the turfcutters'
Honeycombed workings.
Now his stained face
Reposes at Aarhus.
I could risk blasphemy.
Consecrate the cauldron bog
Our hold ground and pray
Him to make germinate
The scattered, ambushed
Flesh of labourers.
Sockinged corpses
Laid out in the farmyards.
Tell-tale skin and teeth
Flecking the sleepers
Of four young brothers, trailed
For miles along the lines.
Something of his sad freedom
As he rode the tumbril
Should come to me, driving.
Saying the names
Tollund. Grauballe, Nebelgard.
Watching the pointing hands
Of country people,
Not knowing their tongue.
Out there in Jutland
In the old man-kinng parishes
I will feel lost.
Unhappy and at home.
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My body was braille
for the creeping influences:
dawn suns groped over my head
and cooled my feet,
through my fabrics and skins
the seeps of winter
digested me,
the illiterate roots
pondered and died
in the cavings
of stomach and socket.
I lay waiting
on the gravel bottom,
my brain darkening,
a jar of spawn
fermenting underground
dreams of Baltic amber.
Bruised berries under my nails,
the vital hoard reducing
in the crock of the pelvis.
My diadem grew carious,
gemstones dropped
in the peat floe
like the bearings of history.
My sach was a black glacier
wrinkling, dyed weaves
and Phoenician stichwork
retted on my breasts"
soft moraines.
I knew winter cold
like the nuzzle of fjords
at my thighs--
the soaked fledge, the heavy
swaddle of hides.
my skull hibernated
in the wet nest of my hair.
Which they robbed.
I was barbered
and stripped
by a turfcutter's spade
who veiled me again
and packed coomb softly
betweent he stone jambs
at my head and my feet.
Till a peer's wife bribed him.
the plait of my hair,
a slimy birth-cord
of bog, had been cut
and I rose from the dark,
hacked bone, skull-ware
frayed stitches, tufts,
small gleams on the bank.
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It blows her hipples
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.
I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighting stone,
the floating rods and boughs.
Under which at first
she was a barked sapling
that is dug up
oak-bone, brain-firkin:
her shaved head
like a stubble of black corn,
her blindfold a soiled bandage,
her noose a ring
to store
the memories of love.
Little adultress,
before they punished you
you were flaxen-haired
undernourished, and you
tar-black face was beautiful.
My poor scapegoat,
I almost love you
but would have cast, I know
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur
of your brain's exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles' webbing
and all your numbered bones:
I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,
who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.
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A path through Jutland fields. Light traffic sound.
Willow bushes; rushes; bog-fir grags
In a swept and gated farmyard; dormant quags.
And silage under warps in its silent mound.
It could have been a still out of the bright
"Townland of Peace", that poem of dream farms
Outside all contention. The scarecrow's arms
Stood open opposite the satellite
Dish in the paddock, where a standing stone
Had been resituated and landscaped:
With tourist signs in futhark runic script
In Danish and in English. Things had moved on.
It could have been Mullhollandstown or Scribe.
The byroads had their names on them in black
And white; it was user-friendly outback
Where we stood footloose, at home beyond the tribe.
More scouts than strangers, ghosts who'd walked
abroad
Unfazed by light, to make a new beginning:
And make a go of it, alive and sinning,
Ourselves again, free-willed again, not bad.
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