Drawing examples from a range of poems discuss Heaney's treatment of what he has called History, Memory and Attachemetns.
MEGAN MCCLUSKIE ADVANCED HIGHER ENGLISH DRAWING EXAMPLES FROM A RANGE OF POEMS DISCUSS HEANEY’S TREATMENT OF WHAT HE HAS CALLED “HISTORY, MEMORY AND ATTACHMENTS.” The Irish poet Seamus Heaney has written many poems focusing on the history of Ireland and his own personal memories. In these poems Heaney looks closely at the problem of sectarianism and violence in Ireland during ‘Digging' is one of Heaney’s poems, written at a time when his poetry was more concerned with the personal - his relationships to his family and the rural world in which he was born. In the poem Heaney memorialises the cycles of manual labour on his family's farm - digging up potatoes and cutting turf on the bog. On one level this seems hardly the material that might engage a poet, but in celebrating the familial and the local, Heaney is drawing attention to the significance of ordinary people on the land as well as attempting to find his place in the world and the very nature of this relationship to that world. Thus, I believe that It is fair to say that this poem clearly demonstrates Heaney’s treatment of what he has called “history, memory and attachments.'Digging' is centrally concerned with the alienation felt by Heaney and the need to negotiate the distance between origins and the present circumstances. In Ireland when he was growing up Heaney was the first generation of working class people to have access to extended education, and the reader sees the difference between the poet inside by the window writing while his father still needs to labour on the land. In one sense the literal positions of father and son - one high at the window, the other low on the ground - shows the cultural distance between them. Similarly, the shift in the speaker's class position, having changed from the difficult circumstances of small farm life to educated middle class security, is registered in the privileged position occupied by Heaney, as he has the luxury of being able to sit by and observe his father labouring outside. Here, Heaney remembers growing up with his father and again this shows that this poem is concerned with both attachments and memory.In ‘Digging’ Heaney is fully aware of his privileged position and feels, if not guilt then a sense that he has been cut off from some integral part of his former life, as symbolised by his relationship to the act of digging. In the poem digging serves to establish a sense of historical continuity: the father's digging at that present moment shifts to twenty years ago, 'Bends low, comes up twenty years away/Stooping in rhythm through the potato drills/Where he was digging.' This past activity of the father is in turn linked to the work
of prior generations, following the same course in life: 'By God, the old man could handle a spade./Just like his own old man.' In these lines there is a great sense of proud in the simple lives of his ancestors, which he is no longer a part. The poem does show that Heaney did feel an affinity to this tradition when he recalls picking up potatoes unearthed by his father's digging: 'He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep To scatter new potatoes that we picked, Loving their cool hardness in our hands.' Heaney clearly shows this affinity ...
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of prior generations, following the same course in life: 'By God, the old man could handle a spade./Just like his own old man.' In these lines there is a great sense of proud in the simple lives of his ancestors, which he is no longer a part. The poem does show that Heaney did feel an affinity to this tradition when he recalls picking up potatoes unearthed by his father's digging: 'He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep To scatter new potatoes that we picked, Loving their cool hardness in our hands.' Heaney clearly shows this affinity in the way he describes his love for their 'cool hardness', and suggests a connectedness between him and the land. In a similar vein, Heaney recalls having 'carried him milk in a bottle/Corked sloppily with paper' to his grandfather as he worked cutting turf on 'Toner's bog'. In both of these instances, while the Heaney's role is peripheral to the activity of digging, he is nonetheless, connected with that activity and the traditional continuities that it embodies. By contrast, Heaney later feels entirely disconnected from this world. As an adult he should be expected to take up his place in the fields but he is now forced to observe from the house: 'I've no spade to follow men like them'. The poem had opened on the lines, 'Between my finger and my thumb/The squat pen rests; snug as a gun', and now concludes repeating the lines, except replacing the last section with 'I'll dig with it'. The opening suggests through the simile of the gun that his writing may venture into the outside problems of the world using his words as a weapon, but the shift from a weapon to a simple farming tool acknowledges that he will be more concerned with the world in which he grew up. The metaphor of digging then takes on greater ramifications that are not just personal. The work he undertakes as a poet can be a kind of 'labour' of the same order as the work of his forebears. He can still preserve the continuities represented by his family by encompassing that farming world within his poetry. If he cannot literally dig, he can 'dig' metaphorically, unearthing the details of the life of his family and community and honouring them by preserving them in his poetry. In this the poem ends on a positive note showing that continuity has been established. Poetry as a form of writing cannot be told in a straight-forward narrative that simply tells what the speaker sees or what is happening. The choice of words and image, the creation of metaphor, the sounds of words and rhythm are all integral in evoking another level of meaning. In 'Digging' Heaney shows the act of digging in terms that transcend the literal action, and shows his attitude to the work of his father and grandfather. The alliteration in 'the squelch and slap/Of soggy peat' and 'curt calls'; the assonance in 'The cold smell of potato mould'; and the onomatopoeia in 'squelch' and 'slap', echoes the sounds they describe. They visually enact the work being done as though you can feel and hear the spade going into the earth. Through this the act of digging is transformed from simply labour into a way of life, embodying a relationship with the environment. This is never romanticised though, it is still hard work done to sustain a livelihood ('his straining rump' and the way his grandfather has a drink and immediately returns to 'heaving sods') and the speaker is fully aware of its hardships, yet is is now something beyond the act by being told in poetry. This is exactly what the speaker has in mind when he says that he will 'dig with it'. The choice of words are of great importance in poetry as they create connotations that set up a subtext to a poem, an underlying set of meanings or metaphorical relations. This is often achieved through setting up new correspondences between words, often incongruous. In the second line the adjective 'squat' is connected to pen. 'Squat' has the duel meanings of bending the body closer to the ground and to settle a piece of land, usually without permission. In this second sense the word suggests that the pen is out of place in this environment. The Heaneyr's father has a spade in his hand which is more fitting to life on a farm while his son has a pen. It is this very incongruity that makes the speaker feel alienated in his old home. He is no longer part of the tradition of the land, but has acquired the more leisurely status of writer, and it is this very dilemma that he is exploring in the poem. The physical action of squatting also has more to do with his father than him - bending his back out in the fields - than the son who sits comfortably observing others work. This difference also echoes throughout the poem, showing how the son's art - his pen - has caused this distance between them. In the first stanza the simile, 'snug as a gun' is also incongruous. The comfort and warmth suggested by 'snug' is a contrast to the cold hardness of the gun (significantly the potatoes later in the poem are describe affectionately as 'cool hardness'), however as the ending shows the pen can be a powerful weapon and in this context it can present a certain comfort as it can be used as a means of alleviating oppression or at least telling the story of people who do not always have a voice in the political world. The digging is also concerned with the actual digging of potatoes that carry great cultural significance to the Irish. Potatoes have been their staple diet for centuries and the images of potatoes and their cultivation draws on a terrible past where a million Irish peasants died in the potato famines in the nineteenth century. In this context potatoes are life itself as well as being a reminder of the great injustices suffered by the Irish because of the oppressive policies of the British. In the poem the traditions that the speaker feels initially alienated from include a tradition of farmers that have had to fight for a living and suffer greatly from outsideforces. 'Punishment' is about a young woman who has been shorn, stripped, killed and thrown into the bog as punishment for adultery. The poem has caused controversy because of the values it seems to represent concerning the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. Through fusing the contemporary with the past, the poem suggests that such violence is everpresent throughout history, and in this sense it seems part of human nature and inevitable. Instead of blaming the specific government, policies and individual groups, Heaney opts out by relegating it to some mythical past instead of the present, and implies that 'such is the nature of the world'. This has been criticised as being conservative in its politics as it fails to confront and engage in the everyday problems and turmoil which has been caused initially by imperialistic policies rather than simple human nature. This is shown early in the poem where the speaker expresses a sense of identification and empathy with the victim, but quickly becomes a voyeur (as he explicitly states later), exercising his male power to take pleasure in the woman's exposed body: 'I can feel the tug of the halter at the nape of her neck, the wind on her naked front. It blows her nipples to amber beads, it shakes the frail rigging of her ribs.' This conflict between empathising on one hand and watching passively, is compounded later when the speaker directs his words to the dead woman: 'My poor scapegoat/I almost love you/but would have cast, I know/the stones of silence.' The 'stones of silence' are an allusion to the story of a woman's adultery in the Bible (John8: 1-12) and through this allusion conflates pagan and Christian mythologies, which again serves to shows such stories happen elsewhere. The speaker indicates that, despite his attraction to her he would have still been complicit in her death, if not directly, then certainly by failing to raise his voice in support of her. In the closing stanzas of the poem, this sense of troubled complicity in an act of violence is extended to the contemporary conflict in Northern Ireland, as the speaker characterises himself as one who has 'stood dumb when your betraying sisters, cauled in tar, wept by the railings, who would connive in civilised outrage yet understand the exact, and tribal, intimate revenge.' The speaker acknowledges he sympathises with the motive of revenge, and this is worse as now it includes those Catholic women in Heaney's own country who were 'tarred and feathered' by members of their own community. This is the 'punishment' of the title as this was inflicted on those who became involved with members of the British Army. Like the victims in Danish pre-history, the women had their heads shaved, before having hot tar and feathers poured over them and being left tied up in a public place, as an act of ritual humiliation. The speaker's attitude to the contemporary punishment, like his response to the women retrieved from the bog, is ambiguous. On one hand, he 'connives/in civilised outrage', yet he finds himself again complicit in the act of retribution, as he admits that he is able to understand the rationale for the punitive act. Though admitting his own complicity it does not change the idea that the poem accepts the inevitability of violence and revenge, and offers a bleak portrayal for any hope of change in Northern Ireland. Heaney's poems range from the more personal poems about his upbringing and the significance of the ordinary life on the land ('Digging'), to those that explore the social injustices, and violent history of his country. The sectarian violence takes centre place in his work and he sometimes addresses specific revenge killings ('Casualty', 'The Strand at Lough Beg'). The Bog poems ('Punishment', 'The Tollund Man'), based on the bodies recovered in the peat of Jutland, are concerned with ancient sacrificial killings that Heaney compares to the contemporary situation in Ireland, and the other major area of his work explores the religious prohibitions on sex that are the cause of children being killed or hidden away ('Limbo' and 'Bye Child') so that the female is not judged by society. 'Casualty' explores the question of the aftermath of the Bloody Sunday killings (January 1972). The central figure presented in the poem is Louis O'Neill, a Catholic fisherman who was a neighbour and acquiantance of Heaney. O'Neill was 'blown to bits' in an IRA pub bombing, carried out in reprisal for Bloody Sunday. Heaney's poems range from the more personal poems about his upbringing and the significance of the ordinary life on the land ('Digging'), to those that explore the social injustices, and violent history of his country. The sectarian violence takes centre place in his work and he sometimes addresses specific revenge killings ('Casualty', 'The Strand at Lough Beg'). The Bog poems ('Punishment', 'The Tollund Man'), based on the bodies recovered in the peat of Jutland, are concerned with ancient sacrificial killings that Heaney compares to the contemporary situation in Ireland, and the other major area of his work explores the religious prohibitions on sex that are the cause of children being killed or hidden away ('Limbo' and 'Bye Child') so that the female is not judged by society.
