AT A POTATO DIGGING
This is a poem concerned with Irish history. Looming over the scene depicted is the spectre of the potato famine that afflicted Ireland from 1845-49. The potato crop, staple for the Irish, failed, and with cataclysmic results. About half the population of three million died, while a million people emigrated – many to America.
The first section of the poem is written in alternately rhymed quatrains that describe a rural scene of potato digging that is clearly in progress much later than a similar scene around the time of the famine. Heaney describes a “mechanical digger” that “wrecks the drill”. Already we ain the machine age and there is a sense that it is destructive. Humans are presented as insects who “swarm in behind”, having to “stoop to fill / Wicker creels”. People seem obeisant to the mechanical digger and their baskets are the traditional containers for the crop, linking them with the potato diggers of the past. An ominous atmosphere is established - inhospitable weather makes “Fingers go dead in the cold”.
Having likened the potato gatherers to insects, Heaney goes on in stanza two to say they are “Like crows attacking crow-black fields”. This bleak image conjures the idea of carrion feeders as well as suggesting something of an omen. There is also nothing exceedingly organised about the operation as the people are in a “higgledy line”. This idea is emphasised through Heaney’s choice of the military word “ranks” premodified by the adjective “ragged”. The work is back breaking and it is clear that it is unremitting because theworkers may only “stand / Tall for a moment but soon stumble back / to fish a new load from the crumbled surf” (lines 8-10). Their subservience to machine, soil and crop is made clear through further details such as “Heads bow, trunks bend, hands fumble…” (line 11). Their activity is described as “Processional stooping” (line 12) which conveys their numbers but also the idea that they are in a procession. This has both a religious
The first section of the poem is written in alternately rhymed quatrains that describe a rural scene of potato digging that is clearly in progress much later than a similar scene around the time of the famine. Heaney describes a “mechanical digger” that “wrecks the drill”. Already we ain the machine age and there is a sense that it is destructive. Humans are presented as insects who “swarm in behind”, having to “stoop to fill / Wicker creels”. People seem obeisant to the mechanical digger and their baskets are the traditional containers for the crop, linking them with the potato diggers of the past. An ominous atmosphere is established - inhospitable weather makes “Fingers go dead in the cold”.
Having likened the potato gatherers to insects, Heaney goes on in stanza two to say they are “Like crows attacking crow-black fields”. This bleak image conjures the idea of carrion feeders as well as suggesting something of an omen. There is also nothing exceedingly organised about the operation as the people are in a “higgledy line”. This idea is emphasised through Heaney’s choice of the military word “ranks” premodified by the adjective “ragged”. The work is back breaking and it is clear that it is unremitting because theworkers may only “stand / Tall for a moment but soon stumble back / to fish a new load from the crumbled surf” (lines 8-10). Their subservience to machine, soil and crop is made clear through further details such as “Heads bow, trunks bend, hands fumble…” (line 11). Their activity is described as “Processional stooping” (line 12) which conveys their numbers but also the idea that they are in a procession. This has both a religious