How does Seamus Heaney shows his family tradition in his poem "Digging"?

One aspect of Heaney's poetry that is notable is the way that he
uses his background growing up in Ireland and the life of his parents and his descendants as
inspiration for his poetry. To Heaney, the lives of his predecessors are rich veins of gold that
he can mine as inspiration for his poetry. Even though the humble lives of his father and
grandfather seem rather banal compared to Heaney's life as a Nobel Prize winning poet, what
Heaney does in this excellent poem is link the two together, exploring how important the family
tradition is to him and how writing poetry is actually very similar to
digging.

In this poem, Heaney expresses his desire to "follow" his
father in the family tradition of digging, and this is aided by an extended metaphor that
compares digging peat to writing poetry:

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The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and
slap

Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an
edge

Through living roots awaken in my
head.

But I've no space to follow men like
them.

However the poem ends with the
determination of the speaker to "dig" with the "squat pen" that rests between his fingers, thus
following in the footsteps of his ancestors metaphorically.