Rhetorical Devices In Digging By Seamus Heaney

With time comes change. No longer do we live in the time where each subsequent generation continues the work of the past. In this day and age people are capable to do their own thing regardless of what the generation before them did … In Seamus Heaney’s poem “Digging”, he depicts a speaker who recalls the work of both his father and grandfather as a potato farmer and peat farmer respectively. These lines of work heavily contrast that of the speakers job as a writer which creates tension throughout the poem. The speaker questions his identity due to it having no relation to that of the previous generations. However as the poem progresses the speaker goes from questioning his identity to discovering it. Through the use of rhetorical devices such as rhyme scheme, enjambment, alliteration, and

Throughout the first four stanzas of the poem the speaker contrasts his work to that of his father which leads him to reflect on his own identity. Heaney immediately begins the poem by introducing the work of the speaker in the first stanza when he says “the squat pen rests” (Heaney 2), which represents a pen in between the fingers of the speaker which insinuates that he is a writer. As the poem progresses to the second stanza rhyming is introduced through the words “sound” (3), “ground” (4), and “down” (5). The establishment of a rhyme scheme in this stanza is peculiar as the other three stanzas lack a specific rhyming structure, thus the rest of the stanzas are free verse. This stanzas rhyming scheme creates a sense of distance from the others, causing the speaker to reflect on his own identity. It is at this point of the poem where he realizes he is unlike his predecessors and only delves deeper into this thought. This reflection