Heaney’s poem opens with a clear indication of time; the speaker’s weapon is introduced before his father, grandfather, or the idea of inheritance: “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests; snug as a gun” (Lines 1-2). “Digging” is, in essence, a poem about tools, and as the speaker moves through layers of memory in the poem, “digging” his way down his family line, Heaney uses those tools to establish a clear chain of inheritance, as well as to illustrate the effects the passage of time have on that inheritance. While the poem is firmly rooted in a particular place, Northern Ireland, the scene of the poem is in flux, moving backwards and forwards in time in a quintessentially Postmodern stream-of-consciousness style.

The speaker’s pen is like a “gun” (Line 2) in that he plans to use it as a weaponized tool. The pen sits in the writer’s hand between finger and thumb, a manner reminiscent of finger-to-trigger placement on a firearm. The use of the “gun” as the first image of the poem is multi-faceted and speaks both to the tensely-coiled Northern Irish Conflict and the violence of the late-20th century in general, as well as to the speaker’s personal intentions.