Digging Up "Digging," "Waterfall": Reading Heaney's Early Poetry in Death of a Naturalist

Abstract

How Seamus Heaney, born on a farm in Northern Ireland in 1939?the year Yeat died?and living under Yeatsian influence, could make himself a new poet is an important question this paper is asking. My way to find this out is to conduct a close reading of some poems, mainly those in Death of a Naturalist, one of his best books of poetry, his first book. I focus on “Waterfall” and “Digging”: the former is much neglected and hardly discussed and the latter mostly regarded as a simple poem.