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Overview
“Digging” is a poem by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney. The poem centers a speaker who has chosen to pursue poetry as his vocation
. Whereas his father and grandfather both made their living through agricultural labor, the speaker will metaphorically use his pen to “dig” through layers of history, memory, and meaning. The speaker of “Digging” bears a remarkable similarity to Heaney himself, who positioned the poem as the opener to his debut collection of 1966, Death of a Naturalist. The poem thus announces Heaney’s own intention to dedicate his life to poetry. Which is exactly what he went on to do, eventually receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995.Read a summary & analysis, an analysis of the speaker, and explanations of important quotes from “Digging.”
