Ravi Aggarwal                                                     GCSE English Coursework

Digging Analysis

I will approach this piece of coursework by first analysing both poems separately and then talking about their similarities and differences at the end. The two poems have similar themes in that they are both about the poet’s memories of their ancestors. They are both about how the poets deal with their feelings by writing a poem.

The poem is about a man who has grown up on a farm in which his ancestors have always worked digging for potatoes. The man in the poem feels guilty because he feels that he is letting his predecessors down because he has found a talent in writing. He feels that he does not want to dig for a living.

The poem starts in the present tense. In the first line you find out that the poem is personal because of the word “my”. The unusual simile “The squat pen rests, snug as a gun” is odd because guns are not thought of as snug or cosy so perhaps he is showing that the pen is like his weapon and can be very powerful or effective in some way.

In the second stanza the man hears a sound from “under his window.” The poet uses onomatopoeia to describe the sound, which gives us a sense of hearing and being able to imagine the “rasping” sound. There is also alliteration with “spade sinks” and “gravely ground.” The persona knows what the “rasping” sound is without even looking down, probably because he has got used to hearing it over the years. This is because sound is shown to trigger off memories in this poem.

The third stanza begins with the reader being told what the noise was. It says that the father is working on the flowerbeds, which implies that the father is quite old because he only digs up flowers now and does not dig for potatoes anymore. Then there is a flashback to twenty years earlier, where the poem changes to past tense. The persona thinks of his father working on the fields digging for potatoes. It tells us that his father was very skilful and was probably an expert at digging because of the phrases “in rhythm” and “potato drills”. The word “digging” pops us again at the end of the third stanza as it is at the end of the second. The word seems to haunt or irritate the poet because he feels he is letting down his ancestors.

In the fourth stanza the persona shows that he has technical expertise by naming the “lug” and the “shaft” which are parts of a spade. This shows that the poet has grown up on the farm and with the equipment. The poet recreates the speed and precision of the digging with sharp cutting sounds such as “tall, tops” and “buried the bright.” This is alliteration to recreate the expertise of the digging. We find out that the narrator is only a child at this time because he only plays with the potatoes. We can tell that the poem is about a place in Ireland because it says that they farm on a potato field which has for a long time been associated with potatoes.

There is an exclamation in the fifth stanza, which could be there because the poet feels he is letting down his predecessors. The line “Just like his old man” is a reminder that all his family stretching back a few generations were diggers. The poet seems to be using genuine admiration for his predecessors in their ability to work on the fields. This is the central point of the poem because it is a lot shorter than the other stanzas.

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The poet has admiration for his grandfather too, because he tells us how good he was at digging for peat. The phrase “corked sloppily with paper” is a contrast to the precision of the digging his predecessors did and perhaps tells us why the poet did not want to dig because he felt he was not as good as them because he was not as precise. It says that his grandfather was very focused on digging because he would just stop to have a drink and then would be back digging straight away. The words “nicking” and “slicing” show ...

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