And yet now in the present Heaney with his education and very different lifestyle feels that his father is now the annoying one, he is an old frail man, much different from what he once was. and now it is his father following Seamus around, asking questions about his work, not understanding what it is he is doing. it is almost as if there has been an entire role reversal between father and son and now it is his father who is stumbling behind seamus, however when seamus was young his father probably humoured him, answered his question and even sometimes carried him on his shoulders because he loved his son and annoying as he was he would not want to get rid of him, but as much as seamus loves his father he dos not simply put up with him following him about, instead he appears to resent him for it and wishes that he would go away and leave him alone.
from the poem ‘digging i learnt that right from the opening line heaney felt that he could do some serious damage to his family just by writing about them, he feels that his squat pen can be used just as dangerously as a gun in hurting his family but it is only resting there,it COULD cause some damage if heaney wanted it too, but it is only resting ready to fire at seamus heaneys will. but just as he has started to write his poem he hears his father below his window digging up the dry, stony soil, (we can tell that this soil is particuarly dry because it is making a rasping sound against the spade and is not wet and sticking to it making it dirty.)
and it causes him to think back to his childhood (i would imagine that this is the case because he mentions watching his father stoop low and then come up 20 years away, i think that heaney is at that point remembering all the emotions and feelings of adoration that he had as a boy when he would watch his father digging potatoes) as a child he obviosly had a lot of admiration for his father and perhaps wanted to be just like him when he grew up, but now he is grown up it is almost as if he and father are a million miles apart and share no past together, because seamus has his fancy education and his father is an uneducated hardworking man, who perhaps can not even read. i feel that heaney thinks there is a huge gap between himself and his father and still in a way admires what his father used to be.
another reason for my thinking that heaney feels a gap between himself and his father is because his grandfather before his father was also a farmer, and seamus heaney appears to have had admired him also, he mentions that his grandfather was the finest worker on his land and that when seamus would take him a refreshment to see him through the day he would only take a swig of his drink and continue working, this shows what a hardworking labourer he was and if his father was also like that then i think seamus feels left out because he has not carried on the family trade and although he respects his father and grandfather he still feels like the black sheep of the family, and yet in a way he realises that he also digs, not with a spade like his father and grandfather before him, but he uses his pen as his tool and he digs at peoples emotions rather than the soil.
so in conclusion i have learned from the poems ‘digging’ and ‘follower’ that seamus heaneys relationship with his father has changed from his childhood admiration for a hardworking, burly, farming type of man who was an expert in his buisness to in a way resenting him for being so annoying and inquisitive about his career and feeling a cut above him but still having admiration for the man that his father used to be when he was a child.
By Shahnaz Emma Zarif