Wednesday, October 2, 2019
Comparing Seamus Heaney’s Digging and Eavan Borland’s In Search of a Nation :: Comparison Compare Contrast Essays
Comparing Seamus Heaney’s Digging and Eavan Borland’s In Search of a Nation    Seamus Heaney’s â€Å"Digging†and Eavan Borland’s â€Å"In Search of a Nation†focus on issues involving identity. Boland’s essay reveals an individual uncertain in her personality, sexuality, and nationality while Heaney’s poem depicts a man who recognizes his family’s lineage of field laborers yet chooses the pen over the shovel. The benefit of reading the two works vis-a-vis reveals how Ireland has influenced their lives.     Heaney’s use of â€Å"digging†provides different metaphorical images. For example, as Heaney sits at the window he hears:        †¦a clean rasping sound        When the spade sinks in to gravelly ground:        My father, digging. I look down                          5        Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds        Bends low, comes up twenty years away        Stooping in rhythm through potato drills        Where he was digging (3). Heaney emphasizes the aspect of time claiming that his father has been laboring for twenty years. He implies that during the twenty years a shift took place from the potato drills to flowerbeds. The shift represents the possible retirement of his father from fieldwork to something more recreational, e.g. gardening, and hints at mortality. The image of a flowerbed invokes a flower arrangement for a gravesite. The imagery coupled with the use of past tense indicates that his father has passed away.    In addition to the aspect of time the fact that he is listening to his father dig suggests a sense of oral tradition that has been passed on to him. Heaney describes his father as being â€Å"Just like his old man†linking himself to his own grandfather (3). Though he has not actively participated in his father’s laboring Heaney would have been able to hear the stories of working in the potato fields. As a result Heaney has learned the historical 1importance of the previous generation. Boland relates well with Heaney in terms of a tradition that in her case is more literary than oral. In her teen years after reading the poem â€Å"The Fool†by Padraic Pearse she unearths deeply seeded emotions of Irish patriotism:        What I see is the way a poem about nationhood has suddenly included me†¦ The        inclusion is not by address or invocation but by a sweeping and self-proposing act of        language that speaks to all the longings I have for grandiloquence and certainty (53).
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