“Digging” by Seamus Heaney was published in 1966 in his first collection “Death of a Naturalist” (Heaney 7) and is one of his first poems. It is permeated with a sense of the natural world and family tradition. The short poem is full of rhyme and sound effects. They are typical features of the Seamus Heaney poetry. “Digging” shows how people can be rooted in a family, tied to traditions and to a home place. The author is proud of his ancestors and expresses his respect and dignity towards them. The title “Digging” is interpreted as hard work. “Digging” causes an interest what the author’s reasons for digging are and what he is digging. The poem begins with the speaker sitting at his desk and holding a pen in his hand: “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests; snug as a gun” (1-2). A pen is a tool of a writer and Heaney shows the choice of his profession. And in his hand the pen feels like a gun. He feels very confident that he is very skilled with the pen as well as with a gun. The father of the speaker is digging outside: “Under my window, a clean rasping sound / When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: / my father digging” (3-5). Another tool is appeared: the spade. There is the speaker with a pen in his hands inside, and his father is digging at the rocky ground. There are two very different tools and activities and Heaney stresses it (Kirsch 121). In lines “Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds / Bends low, comes up …show more content…
He made the stylistic revolution of visual comparisons, wordplay and puns. As a representative of so-called “the Martian School” Raine taught his reader to become an alien in our familiar world in order to free the abilities of perception and let it grow in the field of experience. Raine could easily familiarize the familiar, his gentle irony became his trademark and well-known examples are dismantled for