Comparing Seamus Heaney’s Digging and Eavan Borland’s In Search of a Nation
Seamus Heaney’s “Digging” and Eavan Borland’s “In Search of a Nation” focus on issues involving identity. Boland’s essay reveals an individual uncertain in her personality, sexuality, and nationality while Heaney’s poem depicts a man who recognizes his family’s lineage of field laborers yet chooses the pen over the shovel. The benefit of reading the two works vis-a-vis reveals how Ireland has influenced their lives.
Heaney’s use of “digging” provides different metaphorical images. For example, as Heaney sits at the window he hears:
…a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks in to gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down 5
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging (3).
Heaney emphasizes the aspect of time claiming that his father has been laboring for twenty years. He implies that during the twenty years a shift took place from the potato drills to flowerbeds. The shift represents the possible retirement of his father from fieldwork to something more recreational, e.g. gardening, and hints at mortality. The image of a flowerbed invokes a flower arrangement for a gravesite. The imagery coupled with the use of past tense indicates that his father has passed away.
In addition to the aspect of time the fact that he is listening to his father dig suggests a sense of oral tradition that has been passed on to him. Heaney describes his father as being “Just like his old man” linking himself to his own grandfather (3). Though he has not actively participated in his father’s laboring Heaney would have been able to hear the stories of working in the potato fields. As a result Heaney has learned the historical 1importance of the previous generation.
Boland relates well with Heaney in terms of a tradition that in her case is more literary than oral. In her teen years after reading the poem “The Fool” by Padraic Pearse she unearths deeply seeded emotions of Irish patriotism:
What I see is the way a poem about nationhood has suddenly included me… The
inclusion is not by address or invocation but by a sweeping and self-proposing act of
language that speaks to all the longings I have for grandiloquence and certainty (53).
“The author explains, “This tomb is a palace” (Cunningham 230). Bobby describes the tomb as a place where he and his brother shared their dreams and fondest moments. They drank and took drugs together there. This tomb was the brother’s sanctuary. Booby recalls hearing his father sawing and banging down in the basement making this clock. Cunningham stresses, “Our father is building a grandfather clock from a kit. He wants to have something to leave us, something for us to pass along” (Cunningham 231). He also recollects his father once again in the basement playing the clarinet. Cunningham adds, “If I put my ear to the floor I can hear him, pulling a long low tomcat moan out of that horn” (Cunningham 237). Most nine year olds shadow their father that is present in the home. From Bobby’s perspective, his father spends most of his time in the basement leaving him no choice but to latch on to his big
Included within the anthology The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction,1[1] are the works of great Irish authors written from around three hundred years ago, until as recently as the last decade. Since one might expect to find in an anthology such as this only expressions and interpretations of Irish or European places, events or peoples, some included material could be quite surprising in its contrasting content. One such inclusion comes from the novel Black Robe,2[2] by Irish-born author Brian Moore. Leaving Ireland as a young man afforded Moore a chance to see a great deal of the world and in reflection afforded him a great diversity of setting and theme in his writings. And while his Black Robe may express little of Ireland itself, it expresses much of Moore in his exploration into evolving concepts of morality, faith, righteousness and the ever-changing human heart.
Stade, George, and Karen Karbiener. “Heaney Seamus.” Bloom’s Literature. Facts on File, Inc. Web. 30 Mar. 2014
When Pearl Harbor was attacked, Jacqueline Cochran tried convincing the Army Air Corps to allow women pilots to operate military air craft within the United States. When that failed she decided to aid the British Air Transport Auxiliary and took a group of women pilots with her. When she returned to recruit a second group she heard that the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS) had been created. Knowing that there would be a need for more than the 25 members of WAFS she established the Women’s Flying Training Detachment (WFTD) with a starting class of 25 women. They ferried, tested, delivered, put flying time on new engines, towed targets for gunnery practice, and instructed male pilot cadets. In August of 1943 the WAFS and WFTD merged to form the Women Airforce Service Pilots, otherwise known as WASP. In the short time the WASP program existed, 25,000 women applied to become a pilot. Only 1,879 candidates were accepted and 1,074 successfully completed the program.3
Hyde delivered a speech before the Irish National Literary Society on the 25th of November, 1892 entitled “The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland.” W.B. Yeats responded to this speech la...
Myers, Sarah Parry. “Women Air Force Service Pilots (WASP).” An Encyclopedia of American Women at War: From the Home Front to the Battlefields. Ed. Lisa T. Frank. 610 - 613. 2013. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 9 April 2014
Seamus Heaney’s poem “Blackberry-Picking” does not merely describe a child’s summer activity of collecting berries for amusement. Rather, it details a stronger motivation, ruled by a more primal urge, guised as a fanciful experience of childhood and its many lessons. This is shown through Heaney’s use of language in the poem, including vibrant diction, intense imagery and powerful metaphor—an uncommon mix coming from a child’s perspective.
There are many factors that will shape a young boy’s life, but possibly none more important than the role of that boy’s father. Seamus Heaney and Theodore Roethke both have shown the importance of the father role in their poems “Digging” and “My Papas Waltz.” Although the roles of the fathers in these poems were different, the respect and admiration shown by their sons is one in the same. Weather it is Heaney’s father digging under his window, or Roehtke’s father dancing him around as a little boy, the love shown in these two poems, shows a direct relation on the lives they shared with their fathers.
The tales were rediscovered around 1880 inspiring the Irish literary revival in romantic fiction by writers such as Lady Augusta Gregory and the poetry and dramatic works of W.B. Yeats. These works wer...
For a united nation to prosper, its people must overcome obstacles and take on numerous responsibilities. Throughout our lives, there are problems occurring continually in our world related to war and combat. During these times of hardship, we must remind ourselves to persevere and continue to defend the country. In addressing the Sylvanus Thayer Award on May 12, 1962, at the city of West Point, New York, General Douglas MacArthur urged Americans to remember the major responsibilities we have as Americans in his speech Duty, Honor, Country. With a position of authority, MacArthur powerfully stated that America will only survive through winning wars and fulfilling our duties. His main priority was to defend the nation, respect the nation, and prosper in that vast nation, otherwise remarked as three key terms: duty, honor, and country. Through the use of rhetorical devices, MacArthur expresses the theme that Americans should defend the country sturdily and carry on its numerous objectives by means of his moral code: “Duty, Honor, Country”.
Within the work, Heaney anthropomorphizes both countries. He compares the geological features of Ireland to the ‘tracked and stretchmarked body’ of a woman, whose most intimate identity - here symbolised by the ‘ferny bed’ and ‘bogland’ is invaded by the phallic ‘battering ram’ of an ‘imperially Male’ invader.
...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.
Raddatz, Martha. Female Fighter Pilot Breaks Gender Barriers. ABC News. Web. Sept. & Oct. 2012. .
In “The Dead,” James Joyce presents the Irish as a people so overwhelmed with times past and people gone that they cannot count themselves among the living. Rather, their preoccupation with the past and lack of faith in the present ensures that they are more dead than they are alive. The story, which takes place at a holiday party, explores the paralyzed condition of the lifeless revelers in relation to the political and cultural stagnation of Ireland. Gabriel Conroy, the story’s main character, differs from his countrymen in that he recognizes the hold that the past has on Irish nationalists and tries to free himself from this living death by shedding his Gaelic roots and embracing Anglican thinking. However, he is not able to escape, and thus Joyce creates a juxtaposition between old and new, dead and alive, and Irish and Anglican within Gabriel. His struggle, as well as the broader struggle within Irish society of accommodating inevitable English influence with traditional Gaelic customs is perpetuated by symbols of snow and shadow, Gabriel’s relationship with his wife, and the epiphany that allows him to rise above it all in a profound and poignant dissertation on Ireland in the time of England.
Many times poetry is reflective of the author’s past as well as their personal struggles. One struggle that poets write about is of identity and the creation, as well as loss, of individual identities. Using a passage from the essay Lava Cameo by Eavan Boland, I will show how two poets use their craft to describe their struggle with identity. Eavan Boland and Seamus Heaney both write poems which express an internal struggle with roles of identity and how they recreate their roles to fit their needs. Through retrospection and reflection, both poets come to realize that the roles they led as well as those they reinvented have created their own personal identities. Boland, in her essay Lava Cameo, touches on several emotions (loss, despair, etc) and episodes in her life which capture the essence of her identity. It is this notion of individual identity that is a central theme throughout Boland’s essay and some of her poems. Boland, through retrospection and hindsight, has been able to recognize the roles that society has dictated that she follow. These roles were not necessarily created for any rational reason (ex: female role as subordinate and even as marital property). One passage in particular captures the internal struggles Boland has endured. This passage runs from pages 27 to 29 in Boland’s Object Lessons. It begins by saying, "It may not be that women poets of another generation…" and ends with "…but because of poetry."