Approximately 50 years later and a continent away, Heaney’s image of farmers prevails. American truck company, Dodge RAM, used Paul Harvey’s speech, “So God Made a Farmer” from a farmer’s convention in a Superbowl ad, which is still running today. I just saw the commercial again last night and was reminded of it as soon as the class started talking about Heaney’s “Digging.” One statement of the speech was especially pertinent, when Paul Harvey says, “Somebody who’d bale a family together with the soft strong bonds of sharing, who would laugh and then sigh, and then reply, with smiling eyes, when his son says he wants to spend his life ‘doing what dad does.’ So God made a farmer.” The last image of the commercial, besides a beautiful, shiny new truck, is a young boy dressed just as the older farmers had been throughout the rest of the ad. He is holding a hat that looks too big for him, presumably his father’s hat. The piece of “Digging” that runs parallel is toward the middle, “By God, the old man could handle a spade./Just like his old man.” The speaker’s father has “coarse boots” and the speaker notices his “straining rump,” clearly farming is hard work. The Dodge commercial is basically a laundry list of hard things farmers do, and ends with the small boy wanting to be like his dad, in conjunction with Harvey’s speech. The reader gets a feeling Heaney is torn between being proud of his father and not wanting to be a farmer because of these hardships, and because he wants to be a poet. In spite of the list of difficulties for a farmer, the boy in the commercial/speech wants to be like his dad, at least for now.
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