A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words.

I chose these two images because after I got done reading this poem, the first image that stayed in my head was of a man hunching over on uneven soil working day in and day out to feed his family. To me, this first picture captures that perfectly. I also had to put this next picture in because it shows that writing is also a form of hard work. Writing and hard work are both being compared to each other in this poem, and it would not have been complete if I did not show both sides of the poem. I personally like the second picture a lot. The empty page, in a way, represents the hardship and skill required to write poetry.

The poem I chose was "Digging" by Seamus Heaney. This poem sticks out to the reader for many reasons. He uses a great deal of figurative language,such as the use of imagery, similes, and metaphors. Right from the second line of the poem, Heaney says "the squat pen rests; snug as a gun". To me, comparing a gun to a pen shows that he feels that he can do many impactfull things with his writing utensil. The gun can be a symbol of power and control over a situation, and comparing his pen to a gun shows that he feels that he has power when he has his pen "[in]between [his] finger and [his] thumb."

Seamus Heaney also creates many images with his use of language. One major image that he creates in the readers mind is men, which in his poem are his father and grandfather, that are hard at work doing difficult labor. One way he creates this image of hard labor is through sound imagery. He uses words such as "rasping", "gravelly ground", and "slap" to depict the noise the hard workers are making when their spades are digging into the wet, moist, ground. Heaney also uses the sense of smell to reach out to the reader. In line 25, he writes, "the cold smell of potato mould". Our generation of people that read this poem might not be able to compare to this smell, but I'm sure this addition of olfactory imagery was meant to be used to give the reader a better sense of the type of hard labor his father and grandfather were doing.

The use of the language to create this image of men doing hard labor enhances the idea of the speaker using his pen as his, utensil of choice. All throughout the poem, the speaker focuses mainly on how his father and grandfather not only did a great deal of hard labor, but also how good they were at it. At one point the speaker said that "[his] grandfather could cut more turf in a day/ Than any other man on Toner's blog". The speaker is shown to have a great deal of respect for his elders and looks up to them for doing what they are good at. At the end of the poem, he uses a metaphor comparing the potato pickers spades to his pen. His pen is what he chooses to work with because, like his elders, he is following what he is good at and what he loves to do.