Digging

The historical and literary are often intertwined, and in Heaney’s poetry, this is certainly the case. Postmodern poetry is touched by a concern for the socio-political and cultural climate of the late-20th century. For Heaney in particular, the concern is quite personal. As an Irish poet, and an Irish poet from Northern Ireland, the violence and unrest of the Troubles are prevalent in Heaney’s writing.

The Troubles in Northern Ireland officially began in the late 1960s; however, the divide between unionists or loyalists—those who want Northern Ireland to remain as part of the United Kingdom, and the Irish nationalists—who want Northern Ireland to become a part of the Republic of Ireland, has long been a divisive argument. The first inklings of division in Northern Ireland began as far back as the 15th and 16th centuries, when England “planted” Protestant British and Scottish settlers within the Northern Irish province of Ulster. The Plantation of Ulster, as it is usually termed, led to a series of battles and attacks between Protestant settlers and the local Irish Catholic majority. In the 1920s, Ireland was partitioned, or divided, by the Government of Ireland Act (1920). Since the partition went into effect, it has escalated unrest among the citizens of Northern Ireland, and the unrest reached its highest point with the onset of the Troubles in the 1960s-1990s.

Even prior to the official start of the Troubles, differences in political and religious beliefs in Ireland often led to conflict (See Yeats’s “Easter, 1916” in the Further Reading section of this guide). The work of other Irish writers, including William Butler Yeats, Ciaran Carson, and even the Irish alternative rock band The Cranberries (Also see “Zombie,” in the Further Reading Section of this guide) features references to the political unrest in Ireland. As a poet from Northern Ireland, Heaney’s work is particularly touched by the strife and division. Heaney, a Catholic, writes extensively about the political unrest. In fact, an entire segment, Part II, of his 1975 collection North focuses on the Troubles, with such poems as “Whatever You Say Say Nothing” and “The Ministry of Fear.”

Even in Heaney’s poems that do not outright feature political details of the Troubles, there is a throughline of violence and the inheritance of conflict. This focus on inheritance, and the weight of it, is obvious in many of Heaney’s poems, including “Digging,” which specifically reflects upon inherited labor in a modern Ireland; the weight of the speaker’s inheritance is heavy, beautiful, and cannot be ignored. Heaney’s bog poems (See “The Grauballe Man” in the Further Reading section of this guide for an example) look closely at the cultures that bore into being modern Northern Ireland through an exploration of the bog bodies: ancient mummified remains, likely sacrificed or murdered, and “buried” in bogs across Northwestern Europe.

Although the Troubles officially ended in 1998 with the Good Friday Agreement, which removed British troops from areas of Northern Ireland and disarmed the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the unification of Ireland remains a possibility, if a legal decision can be reached by a majority of the citizens of Northern Ireland.