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Analysis of Seamus Heaney’s “Digging” and Margaret Atwood’s “Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer.” The poems, “Digging” and “Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer” by Seamus Heaney and Margaret Atwood respectively both revolve around selfhood and identity and the difficulties in attaining the same. In the “Digging,” Heaney starts the poem with a self-image, pen in hand. He hears some kind of sound through his window in which case, we come to understand it is his father that is digging. Nonetheless, in line 7, we come to understand that the sound is possibly an echo from the past. In essence, this makes us look into the poem as taking the speaker through not just his father’s memory but also a journey through time in search of self. Further, …show more content…
“Digging” is a rather short poem with no set pattern. As a matter of fact, it breaks up into two to five line stanzas. Notably, the use of the first person “I” that wields a pen, alongside the family memories, place the author in the scene making it an autobiographical poem; a search for true self. This is further reinforced by the fact that lots Heaney’s native Ireland’s terminology are characteristic of the poem. It is clear that as the poem progresses, Heaney reveals his father’s identity despite having lived twenty years ago. Through the author’s words, an image of his father and hence owner identity is developed. However, the clarity that the reader may want remains a mirage. The difficulties the readers experience in trying to the mystery behind the author’s father featuring in the poem and the sounds from beneath the windows serves to emphasize on just how clarity is not easily achieved in both poems. Given that his father passed away twenty years before, the echoing sound can be considered digging of graves; an image reinforced through smell and feel of soil evocations. Through the poem we however learn that about his father but also his grandfather. His father was a laborer and a potato farmer while his grandfather was a “turf,” or peat digger. The middle stanzas place emphasis of the act of digging that as we come to realize was a part of the author’s childhood. In contrast to Heaney’s, Atwood seems to mock the "pioneer," who by definition brings progress to a pristine area. With the touch of man, who builds fences and houses and breaks ground for gardens comes progress. But, this progress is insane because the innate savagery of the land remains intact. As a matter of fact, the poem’s theme other than self-identity, delves into the nature-man conflict that is often typical of human identity. In an ironical way, Atwood employs the water metaphor in arguing that exists no real boundaries in wilderness. Additionally, in a manner than presents mystery to the reader in the pioneer not being able to name wild things is similar to the case in the “Digging.” In the poem, Atwood continuously compares civilization to wilderness and the society against savagery.
In essence, it’s more like seeking an identity. As a matter of fact, this provides a metaphor for human personality divisions with society, civilization and culture being representative of humanity rational side while the wild represents irrationality and primitivism that presents itself in each and very human. There is a dramatized urge for the civilized to ignore wilderness or rather, primitiveness to no success. It almost sounds that Atwood emphasizes that there is an aspect of human personality that we have to defend ourselves against. This is achieved in his elaboration on the usefulness of defending against wilderness. Like in many poems, it presents some form of tension, typical of humanity. Landscapes as presented in the poem are just as harsh as the lives of the forefathers depicted in the …show more content…
“Digging”. harsh and brutal, wild and unconquerable, like the heart of darkness within all human The middle stanzas paint a picture of the activity of digging, as it was part of Heaney’s childhood: The father stoops “in rhythm,” and the spade is held “firmly.” The separate parts o Clarity is something that has to be fought for and does not come easily.
The difficulties of the reader trying to "see" the speaker are further compounded by the revelation that the speaker is actually dead, and the difficulties of identifying her in the photo are compounded by the "distortion" of the light. However, perhaps there is a vague hope as the poem ends with the promise that if the reader looks "long enough / eventually" they will see the speaker. Identity and selfhood can be established but only as a result of much time and effort. In "This is a Photograph of Me," inspite of the easy assurances of the speaker that we will see her picture, it is clear as the poem develops and the speaker reveals her true identity as a dead person that the clarity she seems to promise never emerges. The challenges in establishing a sense of identity are portrayed in the speaker's description of what the viewer will see as they look at the photo to begin with: Heaney begins the poem with an image of himself, pen in hand. He hears or is remembering the sound of digging under his window. It is his “father, digging”; however, the reader is told in line 7 that it is an echo from the past. Knowing that, “to ‘look down’ ” can be understood to refer both to the memory of his father’s presence below the window and to looking back through time to it. The image of his father as he “Bends low” can also mean two things: the bending that accompanies digging and the stooping of
age. “Digging” is a relatively short poem (thirty-one lines) in free verse. While it has no set pattern of doing so, it breaks up into stanzas of two to five lines. The presence in the poem of the first person “I” who wields a pen, and the family reminiscences, identify the speaker as Seamus Heaney himself and the poem as autobiographical. The poem is filled with the terminology of Heaney’s native Ireland. At first it seems to be a smeared print: blurred lines and grey flecks blended with the paper... Clarity is something that has to be fought for and does not come easily. The difficulties of the reader trying to "see" the speaker are further compounded by the revelation that the speaker is actually dead, and the difficulties of identifying her in the photo are compounded by the "distortion" of the light. However, perhaps there is a vague hope as the poem ends with the promise that if the reader looks "long enough / eventually" they will see the speaker. Identity and selfhood can be established but only as a result of much time and effort. Very little hope is given to the pioneer in "Porgressive Insanities of a Pioneer." He seems determined to stamp his identity on the soil where he is based, yet he is repulsed at every turn. For example, his efforts to sow his crops and tame the soil is shown to be futile: It was like enticing whales with a bent pin. Note the comparison and how pointless it is to try and fish for whales with nothing more than a "bent / pin" to attract them and catch them. In spite of all of his efforts to tame the soil and enact dominion on this Eden around him (and Atwood makes deliberate allusions to the Biblical story of creation, perhaps to mock the male prototype figure), the pioneer is shown in the last stanza to have failed in his attempt to establish a sense of identity and selfhood, as in the end he "foresaw his disintegration." The final image presents an unsettling vision of the wilderness around him reinvading the space he has tried to clear. Again, selfhood is presented as a struggle and a battle, and in this poem the speaker fails.
These are the philosophical conclusions the narrator comes to and then summarises in the coda. This essentially states that archaeology is unimportant due to its failure to capture the human spirit. The archaeologist himself, therefore, might be a personification of archaeologists or archaeology as a whole. Exact details about his study are not included, and the ambiguity of his conclusions, the most emphasized fact, applies to all ancient history. Personification of concepts or large groups are present the poem: e.g. "the criminal in us." This simplifies the concepts being referred to, both making them more accessible, and expressing them in fewer words. Therefore, doing this tightens the structure of the poem. The archaeologist’s inability to answer the questions posed by the narrator both parallels his lack of awareness of the narrator's viewpoint, and discredits him to the audience. This vindicates the narrator's final dismissal of 'history'. The narrator, of course, can only make discoveries if they are a character themself, with a unique perspective which may or may not reflect the authors. If not, they are a persona used to consider an issue from a new perspective. The visibility of the narrator is demonstrated through their use of colloquial language - "that's a stumper". In the coda and title, attention is also
The timeline carries on chronologically, the intense imagery exaggerated to allow the poem to mimic childlike mannerisms. This, subjectively, lets the reader experience the adventure through the young speaker’s eyes. The personification of “sunset”, (5) “shutters”, (8) “shadows”, (19) and “lamplights” (10) makes the world appear alive and allows nothing to be a passing detail, very akin to a child’s imagination. The sunset, alive as it may seem, ordinarily depicts a euphemism for death, similar to the image of the “shutters closing like the eyelids”
Stacy notes that this passage is related to "a person getting a sense of their self in relation to Nature." The Web material describes Thoreau’s practice of linking landscape and identity.
...ttachment or emotion. Again, Heaney repeats the use of a discourse marker, to highlight how vividly he remembers the terrible time “Next morning, I went up into the room”. In contrast to the rest of the poem, Heaney finally writes more personally, beginning with the personal pronoun “I”. He describes his memory with an atmosphere that is soft and peaceful “Snowdrops and Candles soothed the bedside” as opposed to the harsh and angry adjectives previously used such as “stanched” and “crying”. With this, Heaney is becoming more and more intimate with his time alone with his brother’s body, and can finally get peace of mind about the death, but still finding the inevitable sadness one feels with the loss of a loved one “A four foot box, a foot for every year”, indirectly telling the reader how young his brother was, and describing that how unfortunate the death was.
Body: The poem opens with the acknowledgment that we wear these masks that hide our true feelings. It emphasizes the cruelty of the pain and suffering that the masks try to cover up, comparable to the picture. By the end it should be well understood, all of the politeness and subdued emotions are just blind of the painful truths that hide behind them. And those masks certainly are not doing anyone any favors.
Heaney does not describe his father and grandfather as rough, unclean men that are practicing hard labour. Rather they are described as artists performing a ritual. Heaney's father digs in a "rhythm" (8), which creates a beautiful image of a man that is doing something meaningful for himself. The words "nestled" (10) and "levered firmly" (11) suggest the professionalism of Heaney's father and establishes the idea of him as an artist and not a...
The Part of this poem that is to be looked at first is imagery in the title of the poem. Seamus Heaney starts us off by giving us this picture of the Strand at Lough Beg, which is the shore of a lake. Already the reader is given the starting point of this story; the Kind of person that Colum McCartney is.
..., the content and form has self-deconstructed, resulting in a meaningless reduction/manifestation of repetition. The primary focus of the poem on the death and memory of a man has been sacrificed, leaving only the skeletal membrane of any sort of focus in the poem. The “Dirge” which initially was meant to reflect on the life of the individual has been completely abstracted. The “Dirge” the reader is left with at the end of the poem is one meant for anyone and no one. Just as the internal contradictions in Kenneth Fearing’s poem have eliminated the substantial significance of each isolated concern, the reader is left without not only a resolution, but any particular tangible meaning at all. The form and content of this poem have quite effectively established a powerful modernist statement, ironically contingent on the absence and not the presence of meaning in life.
The poem begins with a first person view. It appears as if the “I” in the first line prepares the reader to step into Weld’s shoes (Grimke). In addition
Heaney’s poem, “Digging” showed that while the boy still loved his father, he did not wish to carry on the tradition of potato digging that had been in his family for generations. For example, Heaney wrote that he had “no spade to follow men like them”(Spence par 1). This quote states that Heaney, although loving his father, did not think he could carry on the tradition. Heaney remembers the way he would bring his grandfather a glass of milk, and would drink the entire bottle, and then would watch his grandfather fall to work once again. This brings about the fact that while still caring a great deal for his father and grandfather, he still would prefer the path of a writer (Glover 542). Ultimately, Heaney chose not to “follow men like them”, and chose instead on becoming a writer. This is backed up later in the poem when Heaney writes “Between my finger and my thumb/The squat pen rests/I’ll dig with it.” Heaney had always watched his father from the upstairs window while he dug, and Heaney would watch and write, and this fanned the fire for Heaney’s desire to become a writer (Pellegrio pa...
Kenyon’s choice of a first person perspective serves as one of two main techniques she uses in developing the reader’s ability to relate to the poem’s emotional implications and thus further her argument regarding the futility of mankind’s search for closure through the mourning process. By choosing to write the poem in the first person, Kenyon encourages the reader to interpret the poem as a story told by the same person who fell victim to the tragedy it details, rather than as a mere account of events observed by a third party. This insertion of the character into the story allows the reader to carefully interpret the messages expressed through her use of diction in describing the events during and after the burial.
In Emily Dickinson’s poem “It Was Not Death”, Dickinson is stuck in a mental state of hopelessness and despair which she cannot define nor understand. As Dickinson does not know the cause of her anguish, she begins the poem by referring to her condition with an unidentified “it”, and throughout the poem she is trying to make sense of this “it”. The poem is written in ballad meter as it consists of four line stanzas that contain alternate lines of iambic tetrameter followed by iambic trimeter.
In Heaney's book of poetry entitled Opened Ground, Heaney shows the readers many different ways in which English rule and influence effected and changed the lives of different people in Ireland. For example, in Two Lorries, Heaney describes a man who is a coal deliverer and his love for Heaney's mother. As the poem progresses, we can see a metamorphosis in the lorry. As the political situation in Ireland escalates and war between different religious factions grows more immanent, the lorry changes from a man who falls in love with Heaney's mother to a raving political and religious war type man who needs to become involved in the skirmish between the religious groups and by doing this eventually blows...
Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow?, leads me to believe that Big
In her poem “It was not Death, for I stood up,” Emily Dickinson creates a depressing state of hopelessness felt by the speaker when trying to understand the tormented condition of her psychological state. The poem produces an extended metaphor of death, which resembles the speaker’s life and state of mind, through the use of various literary devices, such as parallel structure, repetition, imagery, personification, and simile, in order to create an overwhelming sense of hopelessness regarding the speaker’s undefined condition.