preview

Imagery And Their Mind Through Descriptions And Sensory Perceptions

Decent Essays

Imagery is the use of language to create “mental pictures” in one’s mind through descriptions and “sensory perceptions” (Wheeler). In“Digging,” Heaney establishes the setting of the poem by describing that he is in what seems to be a room with a window that overlooks an area of green. He starts the poem off with “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests; snug as a gun. / Under my window, a clean rasping sound / When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: / My father, digging. I look down” (“Digging”). He uses the appeals to sound, as in “a clean rasping sound” and “the spade sinks into gravelly ground,” as well as appeals to sight, “I look down,” and appeals to touch, “[b]etween my finger and my thumb,” to create an image in the reader’s mind of what that day, or perhaps thought, looked like. The image that is created is one that shows contrast, in this case between an unidentified narrator and his father. As the poem continues, Heaney describes “But I’ve no spade to follow men like them. / Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.” The contrast that this furthers is the idea that the narrator is very different from his father, creating a divide that can be the start of tension. Because the narrator and his father cannot necessarily understand each other due to these differences, as each chooses his different approach to digging, the narrator seems to understand that not much can be done about the father’s choice to remain a

Get Access