Irish Poet Seamus Heaney

The Irish poet, Seamus Heaney broadcasts his constant awe towards his family member’s abilities in a plethora of his poems. In the poem “Follower,” Heaney brags about his father being a digger and yearns to follow the family tradition, which in his poem “Digging” he gains closure by claiming that he can “dig” in his own sense by writing. In “Clearances #5,” the poet is in awe with his mother’s ability to make sheets out of mere flour sacks. Heaney’s work stresses the importance of family life through his continual uses of repetition and caesura.

Heaney emphasizes the use of repetition in numerous works. In “Digging,” the poet starts by eliciting an image of the speaker sitting at a desk with a “squat pen” in hand, possibly pondering on what to write (Line 2). The poet has a flashback to the past where he imagines his father and his grandfather digging for potatoes. “Digging” shows Heaney’s “struggle to reconcile his calling as a writer with his family’s expectations” (Vendler 93). He compares his lineage’s job as a digger to his present day job of writing. He finds comfort by using repetition in the last stanza to return from his flashback and conclude that he will continue the family tradition by metaphorically “digging” with his writing. Some say that Heaney’s “proposal to engage in poetic digging” is nothing more than an “ironic continuity of his role” as part of the family (Kearney 37). We also see the redundancy of the phrase “old man” (Line 15-16), used to describe the phenomena that the poet’s lineage have all been diggers. Heaney points out that in this ancestry of diggers; he has been the first to stray from the family job by becoming a writer. Yet, he remains in touch with his “roots” (Line 27) by committing to have th...

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...steps later even after his mom died. In addition, the comma after “beforehand” (Line 11) signifies a contrast with the speaker’s life with his mom before their shared experience to their experience while folding the sheets. Both instances showed how much of an impact this event had on the speaker.

Repetition and caesura mutually played a huge impact in the development of Heaney’s poems “Digging,” “Follower,” and “Clearances Sonnet #5.” These among other literary techniques are what make Heaney’s work unique and distinguishable from other pieces of poetry. In addition to his plethora of literary elements, Heaney establishes the constant theme of his family reoccurring throughout his work. However, unlike typical poets, Heaney refrains from writing the usual overly sentimental poems by instead describing occurrences where he felt emotionally connected to his family.