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 terra firma Seamus Heaneys Digging and Eavan Borlands In Search of a Nation focus on issues involving identity. Bolands essay reveals an individual uncertain in her personality, sexuality, and nationality maculation Heaneys poem depicts a man who recognizes his familys lineage of field laborers yet chooses the pen over the shovel. The benefit of reading the two works twin reveals how Ireland has influenced their lives. Heaneys use 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 gravelly ground My pose, digging. I look down 5 Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds Bends low, comes up twenty years away bow 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 constitution 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 f scrap 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 Just like his old man linking himself to his own granddad (3). Though he has not actively participated in his fathers 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 The Fo ol 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).