Bored upon first reading “Digging,” perhaps Seamus Heaney’s most famous poem, and preferring verse “with a little muss and bedhead,” Elisa Gonzalez came late to the celebrated Irish poet’s work. In this lovely piece for The Yale Review, she relates reading The Poems of Seamus Heaney, a new collection featuring “Heaney’s twelve full-length volumes, a chapbook, and dozens more poems.” In returning to “Digging” again many years later, she finds the poem a doorway into understanding and appreciating the late poet’s body of work.
As I listened to Heaney, some of my old resistance to the lines’ forceful march came back, but it occurred to me that “Digging” offered a model for tackling his daunting trove. Poetry, Heaney said in a lecture in 1974, is no surface matter. It arises “as revelation of the self to the self”; it uncovers “the buried shard.” To follow him, I, too, would have to dig. Attention to Heaney and his lifelong habit of unearthing, shaped by an Ireland layered with histories and enmities, hasn’t led me to a “true” version of the poet (what would that even mean?), but it has revealed a poet at once less assured and more curious—above all, more interesting—than the one I had shunned.
More picks from The Yale Review
When Fact-Checking Meant Something
“Some of us threw up in the mornings before sitting down at our desks. Some of us smoked too much. All of us worried. But our state of doubt wasn’t only fearful; it was also electrifying.”
Who Was the Foodie?
“What it would mean to take taste seriously again?”
Is Mary Oliver Embarrassing?
“Shame seemed like an obstacle to appreciating the poet. Instead, it became the key to understanding her work.”
