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Heaney Digging Tone

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Heaney Digging Tone
Seamus Heaney eloquently uses language to express the complex attitude of the speaker within his poem "Digging." The speaker has rejected his family's path of farming by perusing writing instead. This is a huge decision and one that he contemplates throughout the poem. Heaney conveys this unique attitude through the combined use of rhyme, rhythm, and sound devices within words such as alliteration, assonance and consonance. These strategies help the reader understand the conflict the speaker feels, as he respectfully admires his father and grandfather from afar. Heaney's writing is enhanced through his many sound devices.

1. The repeated "s" "s" and "g" "g" alliteration in the second stanza emphasizes the movement of the shovel repeatedly,
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