Digging by Seamus Heaney uses many forms of imagery to convey the message that the narrator will not be like his father. Heaney uses similes, metaphors, and symbolism to distingish his poem.
“The squat pen rests;/snug as a gun,” is a smile comparing how the pen fits in his hand like a gun. That he is meant to be a writer. As a gun perfectly fits in a shooters hand, so does the pen for the narrator. His father is a potato farmer and he doesn’t want to be a farmer.
“Bends low, comes up twenty years away/Stooping in rhythm through potato drills,” this symbolizes the stop of patriarchy in his male figure as he’s going to stop the family tradition of potato farming. He has fear of ending the “power” of the family business. “I carried him milk in a bottle…he straightened up/to drink it…slicing neatly, heaving sod,” is comparing himself to his father. He juxtaposed to compare his sloppy work to his fathers neatly; perfected work and he will worry that he will never catch up to their standards.
“By god, the old man could handle a spade/Just like his old man,” which continuously discusses how talented his father and grandfather were with the spade on the farm. He feels that he is not qualified to work in the field, but more fitted for his pen.
Heaney uses a metaphor to end his poem. “The squat pen rests/I’ll dig with it,” compares that the spade is their strength, and his weakness. So he will never able to work in the fields like his ancestors.
4 comments:
"I carried him milk....is comparing himself to his father." Actually in this stanza he is contrasting himself from his grandfather not the father. At the beginning of the stanza he talked about "my grandfather cut more..." and then goes "once i carried him milk." The him is the grandfather.
He is showing how he and his grandfather are different. His grandfather work "neatly
while he work "sloppily."
The last lines, he is saying the pen is his tool to write with just as the spade is the tool his father and grandfather uses to farm.
It seems that he is not worried about lacking the skills of his father and grandfather, but that he takes pride in their previous work and respects them for their skills in that area. He seems to say that he will be good at writing, because he will dig, just as his ancestors did (lines 30-31).
He compares himself to the meticulous work of his grandfather, and also uses the images of his father at work as a powerful part in his inspiration. However, I am not sure he is using them to symbolize the end of patriarchy. It is creating an image of labor, and shows his respect for them.
He does, feel unworthy of the spade though and that work, and more fitted for the pen as you said as he says in line 29, "but I've no spade to follow men like them."
I was not familiar with the phrase "snug as a gun", and your commentary on the line sparked some thought on how the pen fit in the speaker's hand. My first impression of the poem, was that the speaker was feeling alienated from his father and family because he was not a hard laborer like them. Though there is a disconnect, the phrase "snug as a gun" connotes that the speaker can also do not manual labor but labor with his pen. The last line "I'll dig with it" shows that the speaker is not just going to sit and mope but work, dig up history, emotions, et cetera with his writing.
I am not sure if he is feeling inadequate for not helping out with the hard labor. But I believe that he is simply looking for a better way to help out. In the poem, it sounded as if he does want to help out; however, he want to do something different. I had the impression that he is simply just looking for his role.
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