Comparing Seamus Heaney’s Digging and Eavan Borland’s In Search of a Nation :: Comparison Compare Contrast Essays

Comparing Seamus Heaneys Digging and Eavan Borlands In Search of a Nation Seamus Heaneys Digging and Eavan Borlands In Search of a Nation focus on issues involving identity. Bolands turn out reveals an individual uncertain in her personality, sexuality, and nationality while Heaneys poem depicts a man who recognizes his familys lineage of field laborers yet chooses the pen everyplace the shovel. The benefit of reading the two works vis-a-vis reveals how Ireland has influenced their lives. Heaneys aim of 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 crude ground My father, digging. I look down 5 Till his torturing rump among the flowerbeds Bends low, comes up twenty long time away hunched in rhythm through potato drills Where he was digging (3). Heaney emphasizes the position 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 privacy 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 recent tense indicates that his father has passed away. In addition to the aspect of time the concomitant that he is listening to his father dig suggests a sense of oral examination tradition that has been passed on to him. Heaney describes his father as being Just manage his old man linking himself to his own grandfather (3). Though he has not actively participated in his fathers laboring Heaney would have been fitting to hear the stories of working in the potato fields. As a ending 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 h er teenaged years after reading the poem The Fool by Padraic Pearse she unearths deep 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 sweep and self-proposing act of language that speaks to all the longings I have for grandiloquence and matter of course (53).