Seamus Heaney's "Digging"
The Daily Poem
Goldberry Studios
4.6 • 729 Ratings
🗓️ 17 March 2025
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
“The form of the poem, in other words, is crucial to poetry’s power to do the thing which always is and always will be to poetry’s credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in so far as they, too, are an earnest of our veritable human being.”
-Seamus Heaney, in his 1995 Nobel acceptance speech
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. |
| 0:08.1 | I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Monday, March 17th, 2025. |
| 0:13.4 | Today's poem comes from one of our favorite Irish poets here at the Daily Poemannes, |
| 0:18.1 | Seamus Haney, and it's one of his better known poems. It's called Digging. |
| 0:22.9 | I'll read it once, offer a few comments, and then read it one more time. |
| 0:28.4 | Digging. |
| 0:31.5 | Between my finger and my thumb, squat pen rests. Snug as a gun. |
| 0:42.0 | Under my window, a clean rasping sound, when the spade sinks into gravelly ground, my father, digging. I look down till his straining rump among |
| 0:49.8 | the flower beds bends low, comes up twenty years away, stooping in rhythm through potato drills where he was digging. |
| 0:58.2 | The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft against the inside knee was levered firmly. |
| 1:04.9 | He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep to scatter new potatoes that we picked, loving their cool hardness in our hands. |
| 1:15.2 | My God, the old man could handle a spade, just like his old man. |
| 1:20.2 | My grandfather cut more turf in a day than any other man on toner's bog. |
| 1:24.9 | Once I carried him milk in a bottle, courted sloppily with paper. |
| 1:29.3 | He straightened up to drink it, then fell to right away, |
| 1:32.1 | Knicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods over his shoulder, |
| 1:36.5 | going down and down for the good turf, digging. |
| 1:41.0 | The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge, |
| 1:48.0 | through living roots awaken in my head. |
| 1:51.3 | But I've no spade to follow men like them. |
| 1:55.5 | Between my finger and my thumb, the squat pen rests. |
| 1:59.8 | I'll dig with it. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Goldberry Studios, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Goldberry Studios and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.