LESSON
5
STUDYING AN AUTHOR
R
eading several works by one author and examining how the author’s
life and ideas might be related to his or her writing is one way to study
an author.
Irish poet Seamus Heaney received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995.
He has written numerous volumes of poetry and, in 2001, he published a
translation of Beowulf to much acclaim and controversy. This lesson includes
one of Heaney’s poems and an excerpt from one of his lectures.
Read and annotate each selection. Use the Response Notes as you have
learned to do throughout this unit. Select the strategies that have been
most helpful to you.
Digging by Seamus Heaney
Response
Notes
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 down
Till 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.
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.
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By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man
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The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken 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. p
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from Are You Doing Any
by Seamus Heaney
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Poetry with Them?
I began teaching in the early 1960s in St. Thomas’s School in the
Ballymurphy area of Belfast, in front of a class of disaffected adolescent
boys, many of whom would end up a decade later as active members of the
Provisional IRA. There was plenty to make them shy away from poetry:
peer pressure, the macho conventions of the playground, a working-class
unease in face of anything that smacked of middle-class pretension—but
even so, the mystery of the thing interested them. And regularly, ritually,
rewardingly, the mystery was enforced.
About once a week, the headmaster of the school would suddenly
appear in the classroom door. Mr. McLaverty was meant to be in his
office, administering, but instead he prowled the corridors in his tweed
suit and polished brogues, seeking whom he might interrupt in order
to get in a bit of the actual schoolmastering that he missed so much.
“Mr. Heaney,” he would say, “are they working hard for you?” “Yes, Mr.
McLaverty,” I would answer. “And are you doing any poetry with them?”
he would ask. “Of course I am,” I would reply. And then, most earnestly, he
would enquire, “Mr. Heaney, when you look at the photograph of a rugby
team in the newspaper, don’t you always know immediately from the look of
the players’ faces which ones of them have studied poetry?” And dutifully,
unfailingly, I would answer, “Yes, Mr. McLaverty.”
Mr. McLaverty could get away with his proposition that poetry changed
people perceptibly for the better only because I was ready to connive with
him. And anyhow, the boys in the class knew that the whole thing was
a masquerade. But it is precisely this masquerade of fictions and ironies
that can draw us out and bring us close to ourselves—“the luck of verbal
playing,” as Auden called it, that can trick us into truth. The paradox of the
arts is that they are all made up, and yet they allow us to get at the reality
of who and what we are, or might be. If it is a mistake to expect them to do
too much, it is a worse mistake to expect them to do too little. p
Response
Notes
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•
Heaney makes two intriguing statements in his lecture. He
agrees with the headmaster that you can tell from a picture
which rugby players read poetry, and he mentions the “paradox
of the arts.” Reread the excerpt to see what sense you make of
these statements. Discuss them with a partner and record your
notes in the Response Notes.
•
The authors in this unit have dealt with topics such as culture,
geography, identity, language, home, writing, and ancestors.
You have looked briefly at the style and structure of their
writing. Draft an essay in which you defend or refute the
statement, “Seamus Heaney is a world author whose concerns
are not restricted to his native Ireland.” Use what you know
about the world authors explored in this unit, as well as your
own experiences.
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How does studying an
author’s life and themes
help you understand his or
her place in the world?
LESSON 5
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