Continuous Hunger

Poetic Representations of Irish Identity and the Great Famine in Seamus Heaney’s “At a Potato Digging” and Desmond Egan’s “Famine, a Sequence”

Abstract

The Great Irish Famine (1845–1851) necessitated processes of collective identity reconstruction and re-narration. Scholars have traced literary transformations of the event up to the period of Modernism, leaving poetry and texts from later generations underexplored. This article examines how Seamus Heaney’s “At a Potato Digging” (1966) and Desmond Egan’s “Famine, a Sequence” (1997) reimagine a persisting cultural wound to redefine the Irish present. In an attempt to approach the ‘missing signifier’ to an inexpressible but palpable reality, Egan’s poem portrays the famine as an unending presence embedded in Ireland’s landscape, language, and collective psyche, using fragmented syntax and pared-down diction to mirror deprivation and the struggle for recovery from cultural trauma. Heaney’s poem, by contrast, explores competing causal narratives and intertwined dependencies by excavating the emblem of the potato, revealing a previously overlooked polysemy of divine, natural, agricultural, and colonial causes. Through poetic reimagining, both works militate against oblivion and advocate asserting the Famine as a foundational and continuing force in Irish self-understanding to enable processes of cultural healing.