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Digging

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Submitted By dle276
Words 1333
Pages 6
Darren Estes
Professor Addington
English 111
04 November 2014

Digging In Seamus Heaney’s, “The Digging” the author tells a story that emphasizes strength and family values to portray that your upbringing and family roots do not have to define your route in life. Heaney also incorporates different rhetorical devices throughout the poem to make the text more vivid. Through this use of language and text manipulation, the reader can grasp the weight of this poem for Heaney, while also identifying with his early background in life. Heaney begins the poem from the perspective of a young man, who has taken a different path in life from that of his family. The son immediately identifies himself as having a different outlook on life by emphasizing the weight of his pen “Between my finger and my thumb/The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.” (Heaney 1-2). This comparison between his pen and a gun shows how powerful he believes his pen can be in regards to the work of his father. We are then shown a scene of his father working outside of his window, which relates to overall theme of the poem and the strength needed to perform hard labor. Through this use of language Heaney shows us the power struggle for the son in this poem, the son sees strength not through the use of manual labor but by other means, while the father values physical strength. Any type of work that requires manual labor can be extremely taxing if done for long periods of time, while visibly showing on the workers who spend their lives doing it. Heaney shows us just how taxing this type of labor can be in this line “Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds/Bends low, comes up twenty years away” (6-7). This line is specifically identifying his father, who has been a potato farmer for his entire life and vividly shows just how hard the work has been on him. Through this line we can see that

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