In the two poems, follower and Digging Seamus Heaney paints vivid,

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In the two poems, follower and Digging Seamus Heaney paints vivid,

sensuous descriptions of his childhood memories of rural, Irish life.

His language is often onomatopoeic as he describes the

Comparing the poems the Follower and Digging

In the two poems, follower and Digging Seamus Heaney paints vivid,

sensuous descriptions of his childhood memories of rural, Irish life.

His language is often onomatopoeic as he describes the “The Horses

strained at his clicking tongue” from the Follower and “the squelch

and slap of soggy peat” In the poem Digging. In this essay I will be

comparing the two poems Follower and Digging, which are both written

by Seamus Heaney, hopefully this will reveal certain styles of writing

the poet uses, and how they are both related to one another.

Seamus Heaney’s relationship to his family and the rural world in

which he was born are exposed in both poems. In the poem Digging he

memorialises the cycles of manual labour on his family's farm –

“digging up potatoes” and “cutting turf on the bog”. At some point

this seems hardly the material that might engage a poet, but in

celebrating the family he has and the manual labour, he is drawing

attention to the significance of ordinary people on the land as well

as attempting to find his place in the world and the very nature of

this relationship to that world. In Follower also Seamus Heaney

represents manual labour of the plough – “the horses strained at his

clicking tongue” “The sod rolled over without braking.” And “his

shoulders globed like a full sail strung.” I like this quote as the

shoulders represent upper body strength for motion to occur, the sail

of a boat is more of where the strength occurs to move the boat. As

stated be...

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...w strength and enabled him to continue dealing with the humiliating

experiences related in Follower. Seamus Heaney has begun to achieve

the distance, the needed perspective to his childhood experiences. He

brings himself into the poem and leaves out no mortifying details. He

is the complete opposite of his father. The three last verses begin "I

stumbled", "I wanted" and "I was a nuisance". It is by accepting and

admitting his shortcomings that he confronts his father again.

Follower is an important part of Seamus Heaney`s process of coming to

terms with his childhood and in it he has come close to a solution:

through the distance violently achieved in Digging Seamus Heaney has

obtained the perspective essential to establish a proper and healthy

relationship to his childhood. Aggravation and resentment are gone and

have been replaced by growing composure.

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