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Sunday, March 21, 2010
“Digging” for Meaning
One of my recent posts about “this week in my classes” discussed a certain flagging of enthusiasm for one of my classes. Soon after, though, I was happy to have a teaching experience that revived my energy (though not for the same class). It was a tutorial session on Seamus Heaney, part of the Brit Lit survey I’m currently teaching. I had no great expectations going in, though I had really enjoyed going over the assigned poems in preparation for the meeting. But it turned out to be one of our best tutorials all term. For the first time, a significant number of students were genuinely enthusiastic about a poem: that is, often students will contribute, thoughtfully, to discussion, but this week even the body language was different, with people leaning forward into the discussion and smiling and nodding at each other as they talked. The poem that got this reaction was Seamus Heaney’s “Digging”:
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look downTill his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awakens in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
I opened by asking about the pen as a gun: why make that particular comparison? What is the risk or the threat of his pen? Pretty quickly we were talking about the difficulty of the poet son, who has broken from the tradition of his father and grandfather, writing about them and their work without condescending to them or, at the other extreme, sentimentalizing them. It turned out (and I think that this is why the discussion became so animated) that many of them understood the anxiety, or perhaps just self-consciousness, of that kind of break from tradition because they have been through it themselves, coming from mining or farming or military backgrounds, sometimes themselves among the first in their families to go to university, or to study something like English, or to want to be writers. One student also pointed to the “sloppily” corked milk bottle, a sign, he suggested (and many agreed) that it speaks to an anxiety also about the manliness or practical value of choosing poetry: there’s an ideal of the “man of the house,” good with his hands, tough, physical, that the speaker can’t reach ("I’ve no spade to follow men like them"). Though he looks down on his father from his window, he isn’t looking down on him otherwise, we thought, but rather seeing him clearly, seeing the dignity of his skill and hard work. He puts his pen to work, in turn, digging up memories (which “awaken in [his] head") and making something himself that (as another student suggested) his father would understand--it’s not difficult poetry, there are no unusual words in it, it’s hardly “poetic” at all, but direct, colloquial, even (sorry) earthy. And yet for all its seeming simplicity, as we dug into it, we found more and more of interest, even before we moved into the more abstract idea of poetry and/as archeology (another of our poems was “The Grauballe Man").
Though we all hate the reduction of literary value to what is “ relatable” (a coinage many students seem unable to resist), and though I’m a big believer in stretching ourselves and our students into what is unfamiliar, there was a great energy today that came from this poem having meaning for them--meaning of its own, that they could appreciate, but also meaning for their own lives.
Comments
This is a good and reassuring story. But (as I know you know) there’s not really a conflict between the clauses of your closing paragraph so long as we allow for temporality instead of trying to do everything at once—we need to establish an opening for conversation before we can get used to the practice of conversation before we can start to value the experience of stretching past the limits of comfortably familiar conversation. The thing that would, I think, drive me mad if I tried to be a professional educator is how easily the process can break down at any of those steps and how many forces try to ensure such breakdowns.
I agree, Ray, both about there not really being a conflict if you allow for the class as a process (and I expect most teachers do try to find a way “in” for their students), and about the frustrations when the process breaks down. Sometimes I think that literature classes are really most valuable simply for providing the opportunity for students to have these experiences with reading in a self-conscious way. All the talk about critical thinking and writing skills and so forth are aimed at an idea of the university that looks out, instead of in. Plus, of course, you can’t really evaluate someone’s experience of a poem or novel, so you have to set up further expectations. Still, I imagine a lot of students will remember “Digging” more than they’ll remember, say, how to get MLA format right or the different ways of defining “Modernism.”
"Though we all hate the reduction of literary value to what is “ relatable” (a coinage many students seem unable to resist), and though I’m a big believer in stretching ourselves and our students into what is unfamiliar, there was a great energy today that came from this poem having meaning for them--meaning of its own, that they could appreciate, but also meaning for their own lives.”
Born and raised on a farm on an island in northern Scotland, poet and scholar Edwin Muir wrote far and away one of the best books on this vital topic, The Estate of Poetry (1962). A brief “accessible” book of criticism that I’m sure your students could well “relate” to as well. An excerpt:
There is a greater poetry than that of the ballads; they [ballads] do not contain those universal statements of life which we find in Dante and Shakespeare; but they were once a general possession as Shakespeare has never been. And that great poetry can, or once could, be a general possession is a fact which we should not forget: those of us who write poetry, and those of us who criticize it. If we could keep it in mind, I think it would give us a more just and adequate idea of poetry… (22).
[A reporter] also quoted Mr. [T. S.] Eliot as saying that ‘criticism of poetry began and ended in enjoyment,’ which I think is the traditional practice. But the observation that is most illuminating in this report is that ‘a genuine poem may arouse a very great number of differing responses, yet there will be always something in common between them,’ and that this is what poetry is for. There have been some very strange responses to poems, as Mr. Richards has shown so convincingly in his book, Practical Criticism, responses which seemed plainly to contradict one another. Yet, even allowing for this, there will be something in common between people’s varied responses to a poem, and the poem exists for that purpose. If we believe this, poetry takes on a wider significance than it is currently allowed, and lets in the ordinary unanalytical reader, and with him human nature. People will read poetry for enjoyment, since that is what it is intended for; and they will not, except in a few exceptional cases, take it up as a strict methodical study. And it may be said that they will get more help, both in enjoyment and understanding, from the traditional critic who tells them what the poem means to him, than from the new one who warns them that it cannot possibly mean what it appears to mean, so that he has no choice left but to explain it. The divorce between the public audience and the poet is widened by this critical method; or perhaps one should rather say that the method legalizes the divorce as a settled and normal state. And that is what we feel to be wrong… (76-77).
I’ve been trying to measure the gap between the public and the poet, and to find some explanation why it is so great. I began with the time when there was neither poet nor public, when the anonymous song or ballad was transmitted from generation to generation by the peasantry, and poetry was a possession so common that poet and audience were lost in it; we have been irreversibly changed. At best we can gain from that or oral poetry that beauty which is in it, and the knowledge that poetry is not a thing reserved for a few, since it was once, and for a long time, treasured and fostered by so many. If, knowing this, we could be brought to modify our contemporary notion of poetry as a rarified and special and often difficult thing, it might have a salutary effect on our criticism and our practice of poetry as well…(94).
The first allegiance of any poet is to imaginative truth…but it does not mean that he should turn inward into the complex problems of poetry, or be concerned with poetry as a problem. That is something which has commonly happened in the last fifty years. There was some excuse for it after the years of experiment associated with Mr. Eliot and Mr. Pound. To them, about 1910, poetry seemed to have come to a dead end, and intense thought had to be given to it. The experiments of that time and the succeeding years have become a part of literary history. As they were new and strange when they were first attempted, they were found difficult by the reader; and they seem to have left for a time in the minds of poets and critics the belief that poetry should be difficult. The experimenters have done their work, and we should be thankful to them. There have been many experimenters in English poetry: Chaucer was one; and Spenser, Milton, Dryden, and Wordsworth were all experimenters. The experimenters of forty years ago did something to poetry and something for poetry. One kind of poetry was written before T.S. Eliot, and another kind after him. But the point of an experiment is that it should solve the particular problem set for it. This was done in the twenties… There remains the temptation for poets to turn inward into poetry, to lock themselves in to a hygienic prison where they speak only to one another, and to the critic, their stern warder. In the end a poet must create his audience, and to do that he must turn outward. Even if he is conscious of having no audience, he must imagine one. That may be the way to conjure it out of the public void. Yeats, who had to wait for it long, declared that you must have an audience, and that he could not write without one. Anyone reading his poetry must feel that the audience was an imaginary one long before it became real. To imagine an audience, one must hold up before himself the variety of human life, for from that diversity the audience will be drawn. The poet need not think of the public – its vastness and impersonality would daunt anyone; he should reflect instead that in no other age than ours – I mean the last hundred years or so – has a poet had to deal with it. He has to see past it, or through it, to the men and women, with their individual lives, who in some strange way and without their choice are part of it, and yet are hidden by it (108-110).
This is excellent.
It’s a grand poem. Mind you, I’ve never been wholly convinced by the ‘my pen is a gun’ trope at the beginning. It strikes me as overcompensation designed to counteract the whole ‘my father did man’s work, and I’ve followed this effeminate line ...’ thing that Rohan and her students note. That
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
with its natty recursion (and its mention of God) taking us back to Adam. Adam, of course, delved; but more than that, Adam delved and Eve span, and here it’s Seamus that’s spinning (words). Here it’s Seamus who’s the supplier of milk. The gun is his way of saying, ‘no, but I’m hard me.’
This is great. Thanks for writing about it.
I’ve nothing to add, except agree that, yeah, it’s not a bad thing when the “relatable” poem is a way in to poetry. (As another reader’s terrific excerpting of The Estate of Poetry makes clear.)