Digging by Seamus Heaney Essay Example

Poetry Analysis“Digging” by Seamus Heaney Passion- Its definition, its pursuit, all revolves around our lives. When a person is passionate about something, he should do what he is passionate about and not what the society or friends tell you to do. With Passion comes a lot of hard-work and perseverance. The narrator in the poem is passionate about writing. This poem by Seamus Heaney talks about the loss of innocence, deals with the loss of childhood innocence and the following transitions into adulthood. In this poem, Like most of his other poems, like “Death of a Naturalist”, we are shown his admiration for his ancestors, his own distorted view of nature and why he became a writer. When you have to dig deep for the good stuff in digging, you have to dig deep for the good stuff for writing something well. It seems the author is suggesting that hard work is important, no matter what line of work you do. Just do it with passion. In this poem, Heaney seems to use his father’s and his grandfather’s digging into the homeland ground as a comparison to his writing and development of his poetry. Heaney’s father and grandfather use their shovels to work with the land, while Heaney uses his poem to work on his ideas to write poetry. The narrative voice in this poem is first person narrative throughout the poem. This is proven already in the first line, in the first stanza: “Between my finger and my thumb”. The narrative voice may very well be Seamus Heaney himself. Seamus mentions ’turf’ in the fifth stanza. Ireland is one of few countries left in Europe that still has turf. There is an obvious link to his country. The poem is written in free verse. This form of free verse allows the poet a freedom for subtle rhythmic variety, for example using assonance, or making words look like they rhyme. The poem's diction is concrete, sensual, and relatively simple and is shaped by