“Digging with heavy…in a deep drain”,
in saying this he is trying to illustrate to Marie how he is not perfect and that he has faults, as well as everyone else. It could also be observed that he is trying to say that for every poem he gets right or publishes there are countless others which are discarded or he feels aren’t good enough. In stanza two he goes onto say
“Yearly I would sow my yard long garden”,
this could be taken to represent the private space which he longs for, himself and his wife, away from the public eye. However, the next couple of lines show how he didn’t always get what he wanted:
“To build a wall”
this is saying that although he wants his private space away from the world, possibly to spend time with Marie,
“Yearly… sods would fall”,
this would suggest that although he has the best of intentions to spend time alone with his wife and family, he often has to give his attention to his poetry or to other people i.e. the media. When it says:
“Exclude sow and pecking hen,”
this proposes that he want to remove criticism from his poetry, and possibly protect his wife from the gossips. This next stanza is revolving around his childhood memories,
“Or in the sucking clabber…”
These are demonstrating ongoing occurrences, as if he is saying he needs to remember his childhood nit only for himself but to give him inspiration for his poems.
“Would burst before the rising autumn rain”
This suggests to the reader that he tried to take up the family business of farming that his father wanted him to but; he decided it wasn’t for him. He tries to spend more time with Marie and not write as many poems but every time he finds a subject or some inspiration to write about he finds the need to put pen to paper and write a poem.
The final stanza appears to be especially dedicated to Marie:
“Whose small imperfect limits would keep breaking”
This is Heaney trying to show how he needs her strength to help him, with his writing and through his personal battles.
The last stanza also shows that the male gender needs girls (or in Heaney’s case Marie) to keep them sane:
“Within…the world”.
“Within our golden ring”
The final line is demonstrating how he would like a home and marriage, he shows this through his references to wedding rings, also the fact that rings are round would suggest to the reader that he wants this relationship to last.. This is one of the poems which Heaney wrote which rhymed, I am now going to look at one based on childhood memories which does not rhyme: i.e. Blackberry Picking.
This poem describes Heaney’s experience of going blackberry picking as a young child and after picking they began to rot:
“For a full week, the blackberries would ripen” and “all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot”.
I feel that this poem would appear to be a description of how things never tend to live up to expectations. In the first stanza of this poem, shows Heaney’s excitement when he discovers the idea of blackberry picking i.e.
“Leaving stains upon the tongue and a lust for picking”
It also demonstrates his complete enthusiasm for actually picking the berries, and collecting a respectable amount:
“Until the tinkling bottom had been covered”
However when you get on to the second stanza it would appear that Heaney suffers a bout of depression, where everything seems to go wrong for him. This is demonstrated in the line:
“We found a fur, a rat grey fungus.”
When I looked at the poem in more detail I could see that there appeared to be quite a few religious symbols, this is particularly evident in the description of the blackberries:
“The flesh was sweet, like thickened wine…summer’s blood”
I think that this could e related to the body of Christ i.e. “flesh”, this could also be seen as a link between the link blood and wine, this can link some aspects of the poem to the last supper. Heaney again brings up the religious symbols when he says:
“With thorn pricks”
This can be linked back to the trial of Jesus, when he was forced to wear a crown of thorns.
A recurring theme of violence and murder becomes evident. Heaney uses the word “peppered”, in the dictionary its definition this is full of holes but when put in context with this poem it can mean covered in scratches from all the thorns. Heaney uses imagery to let the reader imagine a hand covered in small holes, which are bleeding. Reference is also made to the character Bluebeard, who was a fairytale character who murdered all 7 of his wives and then put their bones in a secret chest in his home. This would suggest that Heaney I trying to relate this poem to “Death of a Naturalist”, whereby his references to death and murder may have ended his blackberry picking trips, similarly the incident with the frogs ended Heaney’s naturalist hobbies.
In relation to Bluebeard, the wives curiosity as to what he had hidden in the closet, which lead to their untimely deaths, you could use the metaphor “curiosity killed the cat” here. This reference to Bluebeard may simply relate to his love of nature and blackberries. Although Heaney knows that the berries he picks will rot, he is still driven to pick them, just as Bluebeards wives were driven to open the closet.
This poem could also be seen as an allegory for life, whereby Heaney’s intention was to have a deeper meaning regarding life itself. This can be seen as all people go through life knowing that at some stage they are going to die but this doesn’t stop them living their lives. Similarly even though Heaney knows that the berries will rot he still picks them each year.
The poem “At a Potato Digging” depicts the main relationship of farming potatoes. This poem in laid out in four main sections, each with its own individual meaning. In the first it is describing how potatoes are gathered today:
“A mechanical digger wrecks the drill”
The second looks at the potato itself in more detail:
“Flint-white purple. They lie scattered like inflated pebbles”
The third part looks back into Irelands history, and more exactly the potato famine, in 1845 when the blight struck:
“The new potato, sound as stone, putrefied when it had lain long days in the pit”
The fourth section is similar to section one as it refers to how potatoes are farmed today:
“Down in the ditch and take their fill”
In the first part Heaney suggests how workers were able to stand upright for a moment before stooping again i.e.
“Tall for a moment but soon shamble back”.
This image implies the ways in which people that have a sense of dignity i.e. servants who are forced to bow to their toil and humble themselves. Modern labourers may be free but they to have a sense of service to the land.
In the poem Heaney refers to the ‘famine God’. Usually food is based as an offering to the Lord, i.e. such as during the harvest festival. However in the poem Heaney suggests that the Irish workers and farmers fear this native God and believe that they must appease him or her. This point is then supported in the section where Heaney describes the following
“Libations of cold tea scatter crusts.”
The word libation suggests that there are giving offerings in order to appease the God of nature.
This poem has certain similarities to ‘Digging’ where the digging of the potato represents the digging into the past which is shown n the poem as it bears references to the potato blight. However this digging could also represent digging into a folk memory i.e. the nature God or a grievance that can never be put right in this time of slavery. The potato digging may be seen to represent looking back on the past memory of all the slaves who have been forced to dig. Heaney also gives us a description of the pain and hardships that these people may have been forced to undergo e.g.
“fingers go dead in the cold”
This poem also has rhyme in it whereas most of Heaney’s other poem s are free verse. The first section has a clear rhyming pattern of ABAB; this is flowed in the second section where the rhyme is continued only with fewer rhymes, as the pattern is not followed completely. Then in the third section the rhyming is changed to AABB where the rhymes come in successive pairs. In part four Heaney returns to the original pattern. However in the last line;
“Libations of cold tea, scatter crusts”
This pattern is not followed; this leads the reader to wonder what the significance of this line is as he makes it stand out from all the rest.
The essay title that I choose to study was: “Choose three poems and write a critical analysis of these poems.” I have looked at three poems examining what I believe that Heaney mean when he was writing them and searching for information on other characters in order to relate them to the poems i.e. ‘Bluebeard’. I felt that there was a common thread through all of the poems that I studied, all of them made some reference to agriculture, in Blackberry Picking it was the actually picking of the berries, in At a Potato Digging, it was the process of harvesting the potato crop and in Poem for Marie, he refers to sowing his garden and digging with heavy spades. All of these poems seem to relate back to his childhood in the sense that although he choose writing over farming, he still pays homage to his farming roots by bringing it up in most of his poems. However, in another sense the three poems are completely different, they range from his childhood memories, to Irish history and back to his early twenties where he meets and falls in love with Marie, all of the poems I studied have completely different subject matter.
I think that Heaney clearly writes about three main topics in this book, his wife and the love he feels for her, his childhood and how it affected him and his decisions in later life as well as Ireland’s history.
