The poem begins with our speaker at his desk, his pen poised to begin writing. He gets distracted by the sound of his father outside, working in the garden, and this sends our speaker into a spiral of memories about his father working in the potato fields when the speaker was a young boy. The memory stretches even further back to his grandfather and the hard work he did as a peat harvester (there's all kinds of hard work going on). Eventually, our speaker snaps out of his daydream, and we find him back at his desk, ready to get to work on his writing.