Poet, playwright and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney passed away late last month at the age of 74.
Often called the "greatest Irish poet since Yeats," Heaney's passing was deeply felt throughout his homeland and around the world. In a statement, Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny wrote, “Seamus Heaney’s death brings great sorrow to Ireland, to language and to literature. He is mourned -- and deeply -- wherever poetry and the world of the spirit are cherished and celebrated.”
Heaney became the fourth Irishman to win the Nobel Prize in literature in 1995, following William Butler Yeats in 1923, George Bernard Shaw in 1925, and Samuel Beckett in 1969. A Roman Catholic native of Northern Ireland, Heaney authored more than 12 collections of poetry, and was one of the most read poets in the world.
Jason Hall, a senior lecturer at Exeter University in Great Britain said he had broad appeal.
"He was a literally poet, but he was also a poet for the people. That's why he has such a command of the public ear as he does, to the extent that people who liked his poetry were called 'Heaney-boppers,'" Hall said.
In his poem, “Digging,” Heaney pays homage to the work of his father and grandfather, and compares their work in the field, to his as a writer.
The poem:
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.
Portion taken from “Death of a Naturalist,” published in 1966. Copyright Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
