Turf cutters are no longer needed because turf is a lot harder to obtain than coal or central heating and secondly people in Ireland are not as poor as they used to be so they no longer need turf now that they have enough money to buy coal and to have central heating. .
The poem is based on sight and visuals. However, the poet uses the other three senses to emphasize what he sees. Examples of the author using sight, " a clean rasping sound. When the spade sinks into the gravely ground." (3-4). The line three is clearly used to emphasize and make the line four clearer. The line four also paints an image in the readers mind of the spade sinking in and the scratching/rasping sound it creates. An example of how the author does the same thing only with the sense touch is, "The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft Against the inside knee was levered firmly." (10-11). In this case line eleven emphasizes the line ten. The emphasis is does by using the words levered and firmly they make the whole phrase seem more realistic. .
However the best possible example of the author combining multiple senses is when the poet uses two senses to emphasize sight "The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge," (25-26). Both lines not only include two senses but one of the senses uses two onomatopoeic words; squelch and slap. These two words suggest someone moving through thick soggy mud, for some reason it also suggests to me that it was on a cold day. I also feel that the line is also quite interesting to read because it paints a clear picture in my minds eye of someone toiling and sloshing around in the mud. I think this is because the poet uses words like; soggy, curt, cuts and edge. Since those words are sharp words they make the phrase clearer and sharper in my minds eye.
I think the poets attitude to work is that of a perfectionist. I get this impression because of how picky he is about describing the way his Father and Grandfather worked.
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. ...
