Analysis of the Poem: Digging Essay Example

Seamus Heaney describes seeing his elderly father straining among the flowerbeds, then it goes into the past tense when he remembers his father and grandfather at work. The last two stanzas return to the present, when Heaney realises that his work is to write. Ant the end, in the final line, however, it is in the future tense, to emphasise Seamus Heaney’s determination “I’ll dig”. This poem symbolises the changing face of Ireland, from a rural country to a modern industrial nation.

As we have said before, the poem is divided into eight stanzas, which we are going to analyse one by one. In the first stanza, Heaney starts his poem introducing to us his pen. He says that it rests in his hand “snug as a gun”. This quote “snug as a gun” (line 2) gives the impression that the pen fits naturally in his hand. In the second stanza, he is looking down from his window to see his father digging. This stanza is perfectly connected with the following one, in which we find he is looking back twenty years to the same place where his father was digging.

The pause between these two stanzas indicates the gap that gap in the time. Seamus Heaney continues describing how his father worked until the fifth stanza, in which he introduces his grandfather, who was a digger too. In the sixth stanza he remembers one day he went to see how his grandfather worked. In the penultimate stanza, Heaney gives us “the cold smell of potato mold”, the sound of “squelch and slap” all this, help us to make more vivid what he

describes.

Moreover in that stanza he realises that his work is writing and not digging: “I’ve no spade to follow men like them”. In the last stanza Heaney repeats the opening lines “Between my finger and my thumb / the squad pen rest”. Now the image of the pen as a gun is replaced by “I’ll dig it”. So, now his pen becomes a metaphorical spade, which suggests that his pen is like his took, as the spades were the tools of his father and grandfather. So, he will continue with his work, digging in his memories through writing.