In this essay I will compare the presentation of family in digging

In this essay I will compare the presentation of family in digging

with at least one other poem in identity. I have chosen to select

Follower.

The title of the poem Digging could refer to turning over soil for

planting or harvesting, or digging deeper to uncover some sort of

treasure. Alternatively the poet could be thinking of digging up the

past, or uncovering some secret hidden in the past.

The poem is written from the poet’s perspective and there is no doubt

that this poem is about a writer for in the opening lines we learn

that: ‘Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests...’

The poet is writing in his room which is upstairs and overlooks the

garden. His attention is caught by the ‘clean rasping sound’ of a

spade digging into the ‘gravelly ground’. The poet looks out and sees

his father digging as he has done for twenty years. Heaney describes

his father with great admiration for his strength and skill as a

farmer. The poet reflects ruefully on the skill that his father and

grandfather possessed with a spade. He is slightly in awe of them as

he celebrates their skills and he regrets his own inability to wield a

spade. The careful, deliberate, way his father cuts into the earth

with his spade makes digging for peat sound like a skilled craft: ‘The

course boot nestled on the lug, the shaft.’

When the poet describes his father uncovering the potatoes he uses

alliteration again in ‘tall tops’ and ‘buried the bridge edge deep’ to

capture the sharp, precise sound of the spade entering the soil. When

the poet hears the sound of his fathers spade digging he lets us hear

it to in the word ‘rasping’, an onomatopoeia, and in the hard

alliterative sound of ‘gravelly ground’.

In digging the dis...

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... him the child: ‘Fell

sometimes on the polished sod; sometimes he rode me on his back.’ This

conveys to the reader just how close the relationship was between

father and son but it also shows how following him was not always easy

on the rough ground. Now he is grown up though it is his father who is

the follower and he now keeps stumbling and ‘will not go away’

Even though the word ‘love’ is never used in the poem, it is obviously

the word that best describes the basis of the relationship existing

between Heaney and his father. The poem is very much a personal

experience, but it has a much wider significance relating to any kind

of hero – worship by a ‘follower’. Now that he is himself an adult,

Heaney acknowledges that the father he hero worshipped as a young boy

has grown old and needs as much tolerance and patience as he himself

once showed his son.