Thursday, January 15th

The poem "Digging" by Robert Heaney draws a parallel between the work of a farmer and a poet. The speaker is a man watching his father shoveling in a potato field while he sits in his room to write. As he watches his father work, he contemplates his own work as a poet.

As the poem progresses, Heaney uses the pen the speaker is holding as an extended metaphor. He compares the pen to the shovel his father is using. In the last lines of the poem he says, "Between my finger and my thumb/The squat pen rests./I'll dig with it." Just as his father and grandfather used a shovel to work in the fields, the speaker is using his pen to do work.

Furthermore, as he watches his father work, he uses images to convey the situation. In line 25, he says, "The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap/Of soggy peat, the curt curds of of an edge/Through living roots awaken in my head." This lines procure vivid images of mud and dirt, allowing the reader to see the situation clearly in their heads. Those lines also contain an onomatopoeia. The words "squelch and slap" sound like what they mean, making the image real for the listener.