Digging imagery

In the poem “Digging” by Heaney he uses metaphor and imagery to show that his life will be very different than the history of his family’s life work. I choose the first picture for this poem because i really thought it showed the image Heaney wanted to get across about digging. Which was that it was hard work and this represents something about his father and himself. Even though digging was hard work, his father loved it. Just like it would be hard for Heaney to choose another path than digging but he loves writting. Despite this difference he shows that he greatly respects his fathers work and that digging has been a legacy of the family when he says “By God, the old man could handle a spade/ just like his old man” But Heaney wants to pursue writing and do great in it just like he thinks his father and grandfather have been great at digging.

The second image i picked was of a man writting and i thought this represented the other part of the image which was his love of writting and how writting was his form of digging. The difference of his father and him is where he shows his love of writing and how much he wants to excel in it because he compares it to his fathers love of digging. He shows this when he writes “But I’ve no spade to follow men like them./ Between my fingers and my thumb/ the squat pen rests./ I’ll dig with it.” And his fathers love of digging is shown in the 6th stanza.

This poem also shows his acceptance that he won’t be able to follow his family legacy of digging. But even though he is choosing a different path he is still doing his own “digging” through writing about their history. He shows that writing can also be an act of excavation but his excavation is of history and trying to find the perfect words to descried and write about that history.