In ‘Digging’ there are three men featured: these are Heaney, his father and Heaney’s grandfather. Heaney is a sound driven poet and uses many onomatopoetic words and phrases. He evokes the memory of his father in the opening lines:
“Under my window a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravely ground”
I feel that this sound is made so vivid that you really can hear a spade digging deep into gravely ground. This is made clear not only by the use of onomatopoeia but also by the use of alliteration. By using the phrase ‘gravely ground’ the hard almost cold sound of the ‘G’ almost brings to life the coldness of the deep inside layers on the gravel.
In ‘Digging’ the word digging itself is used on many occasions throughout the poem. Heaney has very cleverly positioned the word in the closing line of three stanzas, the second, third and sixth.
“Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.”
By using the word digging in the poem Heaney is constantly reminding the reader what the message of the poem is about; Heaney’s past and the admiration he has for rural Irish farmers. The word ‘digging’ itself is a metaphor for Heaney digging up his past and unearthing the hidden memories he has.
Just as ‘Digging’ evokes memories of the past so does ‘Follower’ but in this poem the focus is much more centred upon Heaney’s relationship with his father. ‘Follower’ is not just about Heaney’s relationship with his father but about his father’s work on the farm as well. Heaney also puts across the message that when he was growing up he loved to watch his father at work. He is also teaching the reader how hard it is for the farmers in rural Ireland to make a simple living. This is shown through the use of technical terms given in the poem. ‘He would set the wing and fit the bright steel-pointed sock.’ This tells the reader that in order to work on the farm you had to be able to use and work with complex mechanisms.
There is a very strong tone of admiration in ‘Follower’. An example of this in the poem is when Heaney compares his father to the mighty Greek God Atlas in the opening lines:
“My father worked with a horse plough,
His shoulders globed like a full sail strung”
As these are the opening lines of the poem they set the tone straight away and make the reader want to read on to find out more about his father’s work. Then when Heaney writes ‘Sometimes he rode me on his back’ gives us the impression that he felt invulnerable when he was on his father’s huge Atlas like shoulders. We know his father was big as the following lines show: ‘All I ever did was follow, in his broad shadow round the farm’. It would seem as Heaney describes the shadow as ‘broad’ that the young Heaney finds his father’s shadow as an area of protection and safety. It is almost as if Heaney is beginning to confess the desire he held when he was a young child to become just like his father.
In the fourth stanza there is an interesting structure change. In the first two stanza’s Heaney begins them with a comment referring to his father, the first stanza begins with ‘My father’ and the second ‘An expert’. Then in the fourth stanza he begins to talk about his own experiences, he writes ‘I stumbled in his hobnailed wake’. The effect of this makes Heaney’s admiration for his father stronger. As talking about himself after his father almost puts himself as second best.
In ‘Follower’ Heaney uses a lot of natural imagery in a similar way to ‘Digging’. In ‘Digging’ he uses natural imagery to describe natural materials such as ‘the cold smell of potato mold’ or the ‘squelch and slap of soggy peat’. Whereas in ‘Follower’ Heaney uses natural imagery to describe not the natural material but the farm objects in the natural farm environment. Heaney talks about a ‘bright steel-pointed sock’ and ‘the polished sod’. This tells the reader that Heaney although he chose a different path in life to his father he still took interest in the farm life when he was younger.
The poem also banishes any idea of Heaney’s childhood being unhappy. I felt personally that he did have an unhappy childhood because in ‘The Early Purges’ he writes: ‘I was six when I first saw kittens drown’ this to me casts a sad image, then he also talks about how he ‘for days sadly hung around the yard’. This sad image is cast aside when in ‘Follower’ when he says ‘ I wanted to grow up and plough’. This tells the reader that he did actually want to become a farmer but things just went differently as he began to discover his talent for writing.
Heaney does not just use natural imagery, as in ‘Follower’ there are some very clear examples of aural imagery. For example in the first stanza Heaney writes: ‘The horse strained at his clicking tongue’. The word ‘clicking’ is a very vivid onomatopoeia so therefore the reader can easily connect with the text and hear the sound in their head as they read the poem. The line also builds up the tone of admiration as he is saying that he cannot believe how a man alone can control such a complex creature with the simple clicking of his tongue.
There are also a lot of contrasts in ‘follower’. One example of a contrast is when he contrasts himself as a little boy to his father who he calls an expert. This is shown in the line ‘I stumbled in his hob-nailed wake’. The word stumbled is an interesting verb as it shows the contrasts between their strengths. Some other examples of interesting verbs used in ‘Follower’ are ‘rolled, tripping and yapping.’ The words ‘tripping’ and ‘yapping’ both reflect the youth and carelessness of the young Heaney and suggest that he feels now as though he was a nuisance on the farm and always distracted his father from his work.
I am concluding that in the two poems ‘Digging’ and ‘Follower’ Seamus Heaney reveals a lot about his attitude towards the past. He shows in great detail his admiration he has for his father and how he used to have a great time living on the rural farm as a child. He also tells us about his family history and how his grandfather also worked on the farm cutting turf. To illustrate his past to the reader Heaney uses many different techniques, all, which I think, have been very successful.
By Lauren Murphy