I

The opening stanza focuses on the picture of a mechanical digger, a farming vehicle, digging up the potatoes and labourers following behind, filling ‘wicker creels’ (baskets) with the potatoes that have been unearthed.

Fingers are described as getting very cold, so cold they ‘go dead’.

A simile is used at the start of stanza two to describe the workers ‘like crows attacking crow-black fields’, the image of birds likens the workers to the common sight of birds following a plough around a field at harvest time to pick out all the grubs that have been unearthed. Here it is the people, probably wearing black, picking up the potatoes.

The operation is compared to fishing in stanza three.

The earth is personified as ‘mother’ giving it a caring, loving quality.

There is also a religious feel to the image ‘processional stooping through the turf recurs mindlessly as autumn’ there is no thought given to the process, it is merely a natural and habitual event, like autumn following summer.

The fear of a ‘famine god’ means that they kneel in reverence to the ‘altar of the sod’. They worship the ground and the potatoes that come from it as without it they would starve, just as people worship god to help them through difficult times.