Ben Nikpour - Week 9 - "Digging" by Donald Hall

    This week I read the poem "Digging" by Donald Hall. When I first read the title, I related it to many of Hall's other works. The title "Digging" gives off a sort of mysterious element but also reminds me of darker topics, as Donald Hall tends to write poems about deep and dark subjects like death. Therefore, I predicted this poem would be about the death of someone he loved or the body's way back to Earth. While this interpretation of the title is not exactly correct, it relates to the content of this piece. 

    This poem has to do with the idea of transformation. Throughout the poem, Hall uses the idea of a seed as a metaphor for a person. The process of the seed becoming a flower represents transformation in human life. Hall starts his piece off with dark imagery. He uses words like midnight, dark, grubby, and vague to set the scene, making the reader feel unease. He also makes the reader the poem's subject as he writes, "you come into the house at dark, your fingers grubby with digging, your eyes vague with the pleasure of digging." This allows the reader to feel a connection to the poem and imagine themselves as the story's main character. He continues to use the word "you" throughout the five stanzas to reinforce the idea that you are part of the story, grabbing the reader's attention and allowing for personalization and imagination. 

    Hall first sets the scene and elaborates on what you are doing but then creates a shift in the second stanza. He talks about the wind taking you out of your bedroom and into a garden where you become a seed. While in the first stanza, he puts you in control, the second stanza takes away your power as the wind controls you, and you are no longer human but just a tiny seed. This represents the start of the theme of uncontrollable transformation. Yet again, he shifts the poem in the third stanza. Now, as a seed, you are no longer flowing through the wind but have fallen to the Earth and cracked. Hall uses powerful language in this stanza, saying, "you will die into the ground in a dead sleep, surrendered to water." In this poem, death is more of a symbol of change and rebirth to fit into the idea of transformation, which is later elaborated in the fourth and fifth stanzas. In more or less vulgar language, Hall describes the process of you as a seed becoming a flower. He mentions going "through the tomb of your dead flesh" to blossom on the surface into your own self, further portraying transformation. 

    Through the metaphors and dark imagery, the poem shows how one evolves and reshapes themselves by moving past their old "dead" self like a rebirth. I am a huge fan of Donald Hall and really enjoyed this poem as he meticulously creates a theme and makes the reader feel connected. 

Digging

One midnight, after a day when lilies

lift themselves out of the ground while you watch them,

and you come into the house at dark

your fingers grubby with digging, your eyes

vague with the pleasure of digging,

let a wind raised from the South

climb through your bedroom window, lift you in its arms

--you have become as small as a seed--

and carry you out of the house, over the black garden,

spinning and fluttering,

and drop you in cracked ground.

The dirt will be cool, rough to your clasped skin

like a man you have never known.

You will die into the ground

in a dead sleep, surrendered to water.

You will wake suffering

a widening pain in your side, a breach

gapped in your tight ribs

where a green shoot struggles to lift itself upwards

through the tomb of your dead flesh

to the sun, to the air of your garden

where you will blossom

in the shape of your own self, thoughtless

with flowers, speaking

to bees, in the language of green and yellow, white and red.