Write about At a Potato Digging and three other poems you enjoyed reading.

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26th September 2010

Write about “At a Potato Digging” and three other poems you enjoyed reading.

Heaney’s poetry is quite agnate, in that it often reflects on his personal memories of childhood and the nostalgia he feels as he looks back. In “Blackberry Picking” and “Death of a Naturalist” he describes a childhood experience that precipitates a change in the boy from the receptive and protected innocence of childhood to the fear and uncertainty of adolescence. Both poems open with an evocation of a summer landscape and Heaney utilises the senses in order to maximise the effect of such a fresh and delightful atmosphere. In “Blackberry Picking” Heaney utilises the berries to personify his memories throughout the poem, the sense of lust and desire which the reader would connote with blackberries. Perhaps, these infer his lust for life, the way he would relish every living moment like it was his last. Furthermore, in “Death of a Naturalist” Heaney applies the frogspawn as a symbol of the dismal changes undergone when a boy becomes a man and in the same way as “blackberry Picking” wishes to enforce a stark contrast between old and new.

Mid-term break, however, is different in that it explored raw emotion and an indescribable event – the loss of a child. Unlike “Blackberry Picking” and “Death of a Naturalist” the poem demonstrates that Heaney’s childhood was not all pleasurable and that he spent a period, in particular, feeling mournful and dispirited. Interestingly, he chooses to limit the linguistic devices, almost until they were almost none existent. This adds weight to the poem and is effective in a different way, as though something is missing. This sense of absence is prevalent throughout the poem and developed through the lack of description, similes, metaphors and consistent stanza structure which his other pieces of work are peppered with. This clearly reflects the way the loss of his brother left him and his family incomplete, as though there was something missing. Moreover, this ineffability, as Heaney seems incapable of comprehending or communicating his feelings, suggests a degree of respect – as though such a tragedy should not ever be attempted to be translated into spoken words, as they could never do it justice. By stripping away from the poetic devices the poet leaves the poem revealed and vulnerable – reflecting a poignant and tragic side to Seamus Heaney. Similarly, “At a Potato Digging” is quite intriguing in that it is structured completely differently to other Seamus Heaney poetry. It deals, once more, with tenses, but the future and present as well as the past. The concepts of depression and reliance are encapsulated within the historical significance of the Irish Potato Famine of 1845. Heaney demonstrates that his poetry doesn’t entirely focus on his memory, by broadening the scope to a far wider group, the entire farming population. The poem deals with the dependency the farmers have on the earth and how if Mother Nature turns against them, their livelihoods become destroyed. The antitheses which ring true are that of prosperity and depression, fear and hope.

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Furthermore, the poems make use imagery and the development of a semantic field to mirror the emotions and themes the poem represents. 'Death of a Naturalist' links language to meaning as well, the vivid imagery of the second stanza creating a marked contrast with the simple, childlike wording of lines fifteen to twenty-one. There is a wealth of description here and we can sympathise with the child's disgust of the creatures that evolved from his precious jars of frogspawn. In “Blackberry Picking” Heaney reflects on spending time in the fields picking blackberries and generates a rural image through vivid descriptions ...

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