I am often asked by friends, and even more often by myself, why I continue to work. There is, of course, no one answer to this question. Many things enter into such a decision. But certainly one of the considerations has to do with the pleasure I get from expressing my opinion on things, which is one of the reasons I like this poem.

Heaney is, I think it is safe to say, one of the world greatest living poets. His 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature cited him for "works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past." He was born in 1939, the eldest in a Catholic family of nine children, at his family's farm in Mossbawn, County Derry, in Northern Ireland. He has had an extraordinarily successful career as a prize winning, best selling poet, having won numerous awards, besides the Nobel Prize, and having sold tens of thousands of books. In 2000, he published a widely acclaimed new verse translation of Beowulf. He lives in Dublin and spends part of each year teaching at Harvard.

It is difficult to characterize the work of so talented a writer, who has been so prolific for so many years, but a biography I found on the internet describes his work as follows: "Heaney's works are rooted in Northern Irish rural life, and draw on myth and unique aspects of the Irish experience. Reflections on his childhood have given way to darker commentaries on the social and political problems in Northern Ireland . . . The central symbol in the author's work is the bog, the wide unfenced county that reaches back millions of years . . . "

Digging was published in 1966 in Heaney's first volume of poetry, a small book entitled "Death of a Naturalist." So, here it is.