Abstract
1. Mil. One of a body of footsoldiers who march with or in advance of an army or regiment, having spades, pickaxes, etc, to dig trenches, and clear and prepare the way for the main body. 2. gen. A digger, an excavator: a miner -1640. 3. fig. One who goes before to prepare the way: one who begins some enterprise, course of action, etc.: an original investigator, explorer or worker; an initiator (of) 1605.2
Our pioneers keep striking
Inwards and downwards,
Every layer they strip
Seems camped on before.
The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage,
The wet centre is bottomless.1
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Notes
The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, ed. C. T. Onions, Oxford University Press, 1984, p. 1589.
Ted Hughes, A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse, London: Faber, 1971. “The poetic imagination is determined finally by the state of negotiation in a person or people between man and his idea of the Creator” (p. 181).
D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949, p. 222.
P. R. King, ‘I Step through Origins’, in Seamus Heaney, ed. Harold Bloom, Chelsea House, 1986, p. 76.
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955, p. 20.
The man primarily responsible for the British handling of the crisis, the Head of the Treasury, Charles Trevelyan, was eventually knighted for his services, and wrote a history of the Famine, which ended in August 1847 according to his account. However, as Robert Kee (Ireland: A History, Abacus, 1982, p. 101) has pointed out, some ‘eighteen months later’, the Dublin Freeman’s Journal posed several pertinent questions about England’s Malthusian policy :
John Wilson Foster, ‘The Poetry of Seamus Heaney’ in Critical Quarterly, 16:1, Manchester, Spring 1974, p. 38.
Cecil Woodham Smith, The Great Hunger, New English Library, Sevenoaks, 1983 edition, p. 190.
Ted Hughes, Wodwo, London: Faber, 1967, p. 19.
Seamus Heaney, The Listener, 21 August 1969, p. 254.
Seamus Heaney, The Poetry Book Society Bulletin, No. 61, Spring 1969.
Seamus Heaney, The Poetry Book Society Bulletin, No. 61, Spring 1969.
Seamus Heaney, The Poetry Book Society Bulletin, No. 61, Spring 1969.
A. L. Lloyd, Folk Song in England, St Albans: Panther, 1969, p. 212.
Seamus Heaney, The Poetry Book Society Bulletin, No. 61, Spring 1969.
Seamus Heaney, The Poetry Book Society Bulletin, No. 61, Spring 1969.
Geoffrey Hill, ‘Genesis’, Collected Poems, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985, p. 16.
Quoted in Thomas Pakenham, The Year of Liberty, St Albans: Granada, 1972, p. 389. The first edition was from Hodder and Stoughton, 1969.
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© 1993 Michael Parker
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Parker, M. (1993). Pioneer, 1966–69. In: Seamus Heaney. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230390256_3
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