For my close reading essay I want to look at Digging, Personal Helicon, and Bogland, and examine what each has to say on the roles of the Irish artist, and his relationship with the land. In all three poems, Heaney looks to the earth - into it. In Digging he looks down through his window at his father and sees him turning over root-laden earth, he looks backward in time at his grandfather digging down under the surface for "the good turf." In Personal Helicon Heaney again looks down into the earth, this time via wells, and sees himself reflected in the still pools. Finally, in Bogland as he looks down into the earth, he looks backward in time once again, seeing relics from the past: extinct animals, ancient butter, decomposing trees.
Towards the end of all three poems Heaney turns from discussing the tangible sorts of depths, diggings, and discoveries towards the artistic ones with which Heaney aligns himself. In Digging he resolves to dig with his pen rather than the ancestral shovel, in Personal Helicon he eschews the childhood seeking out of reflections in water in favor of using poetry "to see myself, to set the darkness echoing." in Bogland Heaney notes that as the bogs of Ireland are inhabited by endless shadows of the past, the Irish psyche - that which Heaney is determined to dig into - may be similarly crusted.
My main idea for the paper is to present the three poems as a progression from the next, Digging suggesting the role of the artist - to dig; Personal Helicon telling why the artist digs - to discover the self; and Bogland showing what the artist digs up in himself.
