One of the best-known poems of Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) is the one titled Digging (Digging), the first canonical piece in his songbook. The son of generations of Irish peasants, young Seamus must have been the first to break with the family's farming tradition. "Between my index finger and thumb / rests the stubby quill," this poem begins. And it ends in the same way, but with the addition of a final line: "I'll use it for digging." It's not an original theme for Heaney: without straying from his own tradition, we could recall the illustrious poet and mud-dugman Verdaguer (who, in fact, was a poet by vocation and only, if anything, a mud-dugman by family origin). Or, even more so, that prodigy by Guerau de Liost entitled Obaga de pechoswhose last verses I hesitate to reproduce, because they convey an emotion very close to that of the Irish Nobel laureate of 1995: "The shade grows little by little, overcoming / the dangers of dryness and fleas. / My father used to say, his lips now confiding, / 'Grandfather planted the shade / and you will cut it down.' / And I say: 'Oh, the! / What will be my endeavor?'