The poem "Digging" (533) by Seamus Heaney is about a person looking out of a window at their Father digging. The poet is describing what he/she sees while their Father is working hard. Then the poem goes on to describe the feelings and emotions that the individual is feeling while the digging is occurring. .
The first and most obvious clue that allows me to realize who the author is in line one, "Between my finger and my thumb." (1). The poet writes in the first person throughout the poem creating the belief that he is speaking about himself. He writes about his Father and his Grandfather and he seems to move from describing his Father to describing his Grandfather. He does this so smoothly that the reader hardly notices that the transition from Father to Grandfather took place. The second clue to revealing the author is slightly more hidden. The poet mentions turf. Now Ireland is one of the only countries left in Europe that still have turf bogs. Since Seamus Heaney is Irish there is an obvious link to his country. When the poet writes about his Grandfather he implies that there used to be a lot of turf cutters in his day. "My Grandfather cut more turf in a day than any other man on Toners bog," (17-18). The lines show the amount of pride that the boy has towards his Grandfather. The line also implies that there used to be a lot of turf-cutters in his day. .
Heaney writes, "But I've no spade to follow men like them." (28). This could be written for a number of reasons, one could be that he just doesn't want to be a turf digger like his family. He might not find it mentally stimulating enough, but fears that his family will be upset about him doing something new and different. But he shows a lot of pride in what his Father and Grandfather do and did for a living. The person may also be upset because turf cutters are no longer needed. In other words the world is changing and "men like them" are no longer needed.
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...
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." ... Digging is what he knows and understands, and he hold onto it as a foundation. ... Another poem that details Heaney's youth and his father's digging is "Follower". ... "Digging" and "Follower" by Seamus Heaney, dissect the notion of "digging". The poems" show that "digging" is part of the Irish culture and "place". ...
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. ...
