Explain his aim in each poem and how he achieves it?

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                Niroshun Nadesalingam

Explain his aim in each poem and how he achieves it?

Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Digging’ and ‘Death of a Naturalist’ represents the poets past. ‘Digging’ covers themes of family traditions and how he feels about breaking this tradition of digging, whereas ‘Death of a Naturalist’ looks at his childhood past, exploring innocence and pleasure of childhood activities and comparing it to the seriousness of growing up. His aim is to explore his past, thinking about his family, environment and childhood. He achieves this through analysing events through memories, personal feelings, imagery, use of senses and many literacy devices such as onomatopoeia, alliteration and rhyme patterns.  

In ‘Digging’ Heaney is thinking about his family traditions of the past. He has broken this tradition by becoming a writer and perhaps feels a little guilty about that. ‘But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.’ While writing we hear his father’s spade which makes him think of the past. He thinks of how skilled his father was and how he did it for a living, planting potatoes. However in ‘Death of a Naturalist’ Heaney is thinking about his childhood past; collecting frogspawn from the ‘flaxdam’ and how he had been fascinated in watching them develop from tadpoles to frogs. He relishes these child-like activities in the first stanza but in the second, there is a sense of time passing; a loss of innocence, when he feels the toads want to seek revenge on him.

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There is a sense of environment in both poems. In ‘Digging’ his memory takes him back to the potato fields where his father and grandfather planted and dug up potatoes for a living. He remembers working with them as a child and appreciated that they were skilled men who had acquired precise and accurate techniques when digging up potatoes. He uses a colloquial expression when he writes ‘By God the old man could handle a spade. Just like his old man’. He enjoyed helping them too, ‘Loving their cool hardness in our hands’.

Heaney’s mind goes further ...

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