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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…
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…
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
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.
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.
Despite the beauty described in the first few stanzas of the poem, it was the feeling of doubt and pondering that approached at the end of the poem that truly was the most thought provoking. Instead of just writing of beauty, Poets must realize that they may be leading people to false ideals, and in doing so that they may actually be causing individuals to believe in something that is nothing more than a dream. This realization makes the image of the questioning poet by far the most important in the piece.
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.
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
...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.
In the poem Harvest Bow, Heaney uses imagery when saying, “And if I spy into
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...
..., 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.
Heaney, Seamus. "Opened Ground, Selected Poems 1966-1996." Follower. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998. 10.
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.