Compare 'A difficult birth and 'At a potato digging'

The poem is resonant with echoes. The ending suggests the miracle of the first Easter - the stone rolled away from Christ's empty tomb. "Easter 1916" marks the uprising that would lead to Irish independence and later, indirectly, to the troubles in Northern Ireland - but it is also memorable as the title of a poem by W.B. Yeats that records the event as the first part of a heroic struggle. Yeats writes, in the chorus, that "a terrible beauty is born". And "peaceful, at a cradling" suggests images of human mothers and children, perhaps even the nativity at Bethlehem.

 In this poem, Gillian Clarke relates two of her greatest concerns - a love of the natural world around her and the political processes that bring war or peace to the world.

Both poets relate their own personal experience to wider events, both events memorable to the poet, but only the wider event memorable to the rest of the world.

In At a potato digging, in presenting the main subject, the “Potato Digging” of the title, Heaney makes two excursions - to inspect the wonderful potato in close-up, and to recall the terrible history with which it will always be associated in Irish memory. This poem has a more complex structure, with more stanzas, each stanza differing from the previous. This formal structure gives the impression of the   At the same time, at the end of each stanza, the audience is prepared for the next. In this poem Heaney looks at man's relationship with the land - the cultivation of the potato is a way into Ireland's social history. The first and last of the four sections depict the digging and gathering in of the potato crop today. The second section looks more closely at the potato, and the third is an account of the great Potato Famine of 1845-1850. In the fourth and final section, the workers take their lunch break - they no longer depend on the potato for their own food (though they earn their pay by digging it). Instead they have “brown bread and tea”, while there is no shortage, and they “take their fill”. But they are not taking any chances - the earth is not to be trusted (“faithless ground”). As they throw away the dregs of the tea and their breadcrumbs, they make their offerings or “libations” to this “god” whom they fear and must appease.

 Like a God, the crops are unpredictable and can cause mass deaths, but they are relied upon regardless and respected.  

. Both writers depict natural events, familiar to country people or farm workers, and relate them to history and wider political perspectives - specific to Ireland in both cases. Seamus Heaney looks at potato farming on a large scale (how it is done, what the potato is like, the Irish people’s feelings for the potato and ), while Gillian Clarke looks at pastoral farming on a small scale - one ewe among the little flock she raises.

Seamus Heaney admires farmers, and recognizes their abilities - which he admits he cannot match. But he also sees much of country life as cruel, arduous and alarming - something he may exaggerate in his poems, to explain why he is a writer and observer but not a farmer. For example, Heaney goes to great lengths to describe the difficult job the laborers on the potato field have.

Gillian Clarke, on the other hand, evidently enjoys both writing and her job as a farmer. Where Seamus Heaney describes the struggles had by the Irish farmers of the past and now (the trouble potato farming has caused them), Gillian Clarke is happy to slip her hands inside a ewe as it gives birth.  

Throughout the poem Heaney’s language changes, suggesting his viewpoint towards the potato does to. Heaney describes how the potato is now and how it was during the famine. Also his description of the earth differs, describing it as being worshipped and life giving to being a “bitch earth”. Clarke doesn’t differ her language as much, focusing the poem more on the sequence of events as more happens within Clarke’s poem. Heaney’s poem concentrates on two main themes, the potato and the Irish struggle with it, past and present. Whereas Clarke pulls in many themes to the birth of the lambs all relating to good coming from bad and how gentle methods get you there in the end. Clarke’s poem has a moral at the end, it is like a fable or parable. Heaney’s poem too conveys a sense of cohesion, the workers getting their fill at the end, but it is more thought provoking and through an amazing use of language conveys many innuendos all relating to the Irish struggle.