An analysis of "Digging and "Follower" by Seamus Heaney.
The Irish have always been great harvesters and hard workers. For years, it has been engrained in their cultural identity; the notion of living off the land, of "digging". In the poems "Digging" and "Follower" by Seamus Heaney, we, the audience, are treated to a look into Irish culture and "place". We learn through the poems, that "digging" is indeed part of Irish culture, and was carried out by both the poet's father and grandfather. Through the poems we realise that new times call for a different type of digging, and thus we empathize with Heaney's choice in the pen, and not the spade. .
In "Digging", the poet detail the art of digging, and says, "By God, the old man could handle a spade./ Just like his old man." This indicates that the skill of digging is a family if not cultural tradition, and it's something that Heaney appreciates and understands. One truly sees Heaney's connection to digging when he writes, "The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap/ Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of a edge/ Through living roots awaken in my head." His father and grandfather's trade of digging are the roots of Heaney's life, and are part of his cultural upbringing and "place". Digging is what he knows and understands, and he hold onto it as a foundation. But he explains, "I've no spade to follow men like them/ Between my finger and my thumb/The squat pen rests./ I"ll dig with it. Although Heaney understands digging and values it, he can't follow in his father's footsteps and take up the spade. His trade is writing and he will utilize it as his own form of "digging" in the sense that, writing will be his way of continuing the culture, by writing of the culture, as he is essentially doing in "digging" and "follower". Also, the act of taking up the pen, rather than the spade, seems to suggest a more sophisticated approach to furthering Ireland's cultural identity and also, their ability to deal with "the troubles".
Within the poem, we see three generations of men taking up a form of "digging.... This is evident in the quote, "My father, digging. ... In "Digging," the narrator struggles with his identity in connection to his family. ... The narrator in "Digging" loves his father and grandfather to a great extent. ... "My father digging, I look down" (5). ...
In the poem "Digging," the speaker's success is held within his identity. The speaker of "Digging" struggles with his identity in relationship to his family. ... Overall, "Digging" represents the speaker's journey toward honoring and departing from his history and finally feeling that his choice of being a writer is acceptable. ... The writer in "Digging" is also a pioneer; he is the first person in generations to use a pen as a digging tool, instead of the physical labor that is done by his father and grandfather with a spade. ... However, the writer i...
The poem "Digging" (533) by Seamus Heaney is about a person looking out of a window at their Father digging. ... Then the poem goes on to describe the feelings and emotions that the individual is feeling while the digging is occurring. ... Digging!" ... On a surface level "Digging by Seamus Heaney was not all that interesting. ... But to follow his own path in life In conclusion I realized that "Digging" is a very complex poem which can be interpreted in a variety of different ways....
Digging, is but one of the many poems from his collection, "Death of a Naturalist". ... In the first stanza of Digging Seamus introduces to us his pen. ... Seamus is witnessing his "father, digging" through flowerbeds. ... Such words give the imagery that potato digging was a hard and rough job. ... Heaney's second memory is one of his grandfather digging turf on Toner's bog. ...
The first piece of this volume, "Digging," is especially significant in that establishes Heaney as a poet both in reality and symbolically: "Digging" symbolizes Heaney's departure from continuity by his choosing to be a poet rather than a farmer like his father, while also maintaining continuity through an extended metaphor in which Heaney suggests writing is his form of "digging." ... He began studying at Queen's University in 1957, and his first volume, Death of a Naturalist, in which "Digging" is included, was published in 1966. ... The privilege of higher education serves a...
In Digging we have three characters: the author (the son), his father, and grandfather. ... My personal interpretation of Digging is that it is a poem of a man who is recollecting of the times we spent with his father and grandfather working and the type of work that they perform. ...
I will compare the two poems of Seamus Heaney,Digging and Death of a Naturalist. ... In "Digging"the words,"my grandfather", refers that it was a childhood memory because, his grandfather would have died, when the poet is an adult.Both of the poems have metaphors, in "Death of a Naturalist", he used metaphors, to widen the imagination of the child he was and in "Digging", he used metaphors to also widen the memories he is talking about.The kind of metaphors in "Digging" are: "The squat pen rests," "bends low,comes up twenty years away", and "when the spade sinks",these metaphors were also ...
In the poems "Digging," by Seamus Heaney and "Those Winter Sundays," by Robert Hayden, both write about their father in reflective poems about childhood. ... When Seamus Heaney also writes about his father, in the poem "Digging," he speaks about his fathers work. ... Digging.... In "Digging" Seamus uses metaphoric tools to represent his connection with his father. "When the spade sinks into the gravely ground: My father, digging. ...
In "Digging" by Seamus Heaney, Heaney compares his work as a writer to the work of his father and grandfather, both farmers who work the land. To Heaney, hard work is the kind of work his father and grandfather demonstrate in the fields; work that is physical and involves hard manual labor like "digging" up potatoes and turf. ... In "Digging", Heaney feels that his writing is not as valuable as the manual labor his father and grandfather engage in when farming. ...
