Summary Of Digging By Seamus Heaney

Firstly, the speaker’s attitude or the tone demonstrates how a person can be the cause of their own misery. From the very start of the poem the speaker has a depressing tone. Any little event that occurs the speaker reads it as a negative occurrence that adds to his ever growing misery. For Example, when the speaker says “Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.” The speaker hears a knock on the door and opens it to see that there is no one there. Instead of going back to sleep he demonstrates his negative attitude by

Childhood is portrayed as a time of safety that is often looked back upon with nostalgia from an adult perspective. Monosyllabic words are used to show the simplicity of childhood life, for example in the line “the thing I could not grasp or name”. The ‘spring violets’ are ‘in their loamy bed’ and are no longer frail and melancholy, and the memory takes place on a ‘hot afternoon’ in contrast to the ‘cold dusk’ that represents the present. Childhood is represented as a joyful, vivacious time in one’s life, and the value of a stable family life is conveyed. The unexpected integration of Australian vernacular in the line ‘it will soon be night, you goose’, adds a sense of freedom and relaxation to the otherwise formal discourse and more rigid structure of the poem, once again reflects the simplicity and innocence that is associated with childhood. The use of

On page 76 the entirety of the stanza is a happy tone of nostalgia. The whole stanza is the child remembering his life as a wonderful time filled with imagination and freedom. He is reminding the reader of how amazing his life was compared to his life now. Collins utilizes this tone to really ingrain in the reader that the kids younger life really was fantastic, and it sets of the reader to for a more dismal feeling when the next stanza comes around. This stanza is so exciting and it gets the reader to remember the extravagant stories they used to imagine with utter joy. This happiness is directly contrasted by the rest of the poem. Collins does a great job of distracting the reader and makes them almost forget about the sadness they read in the previous stanza so they get hit really hard with the sadness again. this is exactly how the child feels about growing up. In the final stanza the child says, “This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself, as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.” (76). The child recognizes that he must grow up and let go of what he used to hold dear at younger ages. The boys feeling are expressed as laborious and distressed, the boy clearly does not want to grow up, yet he is extremely saddened by the fact that he has to. The reader shares the kids feeling of sadness because like

The tone of the poem changes as the poem progresses. The poem begins with energetic language like “full of heroic tales” and “by a mere swing to his shoulder”. The composer also uses hyperboles like “My father began as a god” and “lifted me to heaven”. The use of this positive language indicates to the responder that the composer is longing for those days – he is nostalgic. It also highlights the perspective of a typical child. The language used in the middle of the poem is highly critical of his father: “A foolish small old man”. This highlights the perspective of a typical teenager and signifies that they have generally conflicting views. The language used in the last section of the poem is more loving and emotional than the rest: “...revealing virtues such as honesty, generosity, integrity”. This draws attention to a mature adult’s perspective.

The first stanza, which contains the son’s childish speech, is short, only three lines. However, by the stanza which contains the son’s angry talkback, the stanza is double in length, having four lines. Each line represents a literal level of maturity and growth that the son has gained. As time moves on, he is able to gain more and more experience in life. As his experience accumulates over time, so does his hostility. His terse, childish begging for his father to simply read another story turns to an angry speech about how he no longer beleievs in his father as an authority figure. Despite this, the son’s psyche changes back, as all this maturation is played out in the father’s head, and when he returns, he is back to his childish self, bu this stanza is the longest in the poem. This suggests that when someone is able to mature enough, they are able to comprehend more of the world than they did before, and are able to act

Because the speaker is direct and clear, we are able to recognize the nostalgic tone simply because of what the speaker is explicitly telling us. However, the structure of the poem also contributes to the tone. There are no punctuations throughout the entire poem, yet we still read it slow enough to create a dramatic and sad mood. The poem is divided into fourteen couplets, each with a substantial gap between them. At the end of a couplet, we are forced to slow down and fully pause before moving on to a new section. In addition, most of the lines are complete clauses

Children are often too juvenile and ignorant to comprehend all that is done for them. The narrator of this poem is now a grown man and is looking back on his childhood. He says that he would “[speak] indifferently to [his father], who had driven out the cold, and polished my good shoes as well.” (Hayden) After working hard all week to provide for his family, the narrator's father would wake early Sunday mornings to tend to his family. As a grown man, he sees how much effort his father put in to keep him content. Sometimes it was difficult to see this because he was overcome by fear: “...slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic anger of that house.” (Hayden). Though the narrator was intimidated by his father, he still loved and appreciated him. This father- son relationship is unique because the bond grows and develops as a strong connection throughout time, with the help of maturity. The narrator of this poem recognises the unappreciated family sacrifices that are made which only improves the bond between a boy and his

There are clues throughout the poem that express the man’s past experiences, leading him to have a hostile tone. The speaker represents his past as “parched years” that he has lived through (7-8) and represents his daughter’s potential future as

It also shows a shift from the present situation to a future one then back to the present. In the beginning of the poem the son is currently waiting for his father to tell him a story and has a sense of eagerness to him while the father has a sense of tiredness to him. This scene is depicted as the father being “in a room full of books in a world of stories,” (6-7) yet the father has difficult trying to come up with a story to tell despite how many are around home. The room that they are in is described as having books of stories inside of it and outside of the room is the whole world that is full of stories to tell. At this point the problem is that the father cannot think of a story to tell his son who asked him to tell him a new story which, according to the father, seems to be the beginning of the end. The father believes that since he is not able to tell stories as quickly and easily as he could before then one day soon, “the boy will give up on his father,” (8-9). These thoughts help to prepare and give background to the glimpse into the future when the boy is getting ready to leave his father by packing his clothes and having his keys ready to go. Since the father saw the day he would lose his son to manhood, once the day actually came the father seemed very upset at the boy but not for leaving but more so for the reasons that he is. The father yells at the son, “Are you a god...that I sit mute before you? Am I a god that I should never disappoint,” (16-18). It seems that the father and son have had an argument or disagreement and the son did not want to deal with all the problems that had grown to be too much for him so he chooses to not say anything to his father at all as he is getting ready to leave. The father calls him out on this and claims that he is imperfect and will disappoint

In the poem the speaker tells us about how his father woke up early on Sundays and warmed the house so his family can wake up comfortably. We are also told that as he would dress up and head down stairs he feared ¨the chronic angers of that house¨, which can be some sort of quarrel between his father and his mother in the house. This can also lead the reader to believe that the father may have had been a hard dad to deal with. However the father would polish his son's shoes with his cracked hands that ached. This shows the love that the father had for his son and now that the son has grown he realizes what his father did for him. The sons morals and feelings have changed him because as he has grown to become a man he has learned the true meaning of love is being there for one's family and not expecting it to be more than what it is. Consequently this teaches him a lesson on how much his father loved him and how much he regrets not telling him thank

The reflection of each poet's childhood is displayed within these lines helping to build a tone for the memories of each narrator.

A child’s future is usually determined by how their parent’s raise them. Their characteristics reflect how life at home was like, if it had an impeccable effect or destroyed the child’s entire outlook on life. Usually, authors of any type of literature use their experiences in life to help inspire their writing and develop emotion to their works. Poetry is a type of literary work in which there is an intensity given to the expression of feelings and ideas by the use of distinct styles and rhythm. These distinct styles include different types of poems such as sonnets, villanelles, free verse, imagist poems, and many more. And these distinct styles are accentuated with the use of literary devices such as metaphors, similes, imagery, personification, rhyme, meter, and more. As a whole, a poem depicts emotions the author and reader’s can relate to. In the poem’s “Those Winter Sundays,” by Robert Hayden, and “My Papa’s Waltz,” by Theodore Roethke, we read about two different parent and child relationships. These two poems help portray the flaws and strength’s parents exhibit and how their children follow their actions and use it as a take away in their grown up lives.

In the poem, I get a sense that there is no bond, like my father and I have which leads to confusion in the narrator's life. For instance, in line eight when he says, "I would slowly rise and dress,/ fearing the chronic angers of the house"(8-9), this gives me a strong sense of sadness, for him because I feel that he is greatly deprived of what every child should have a good role model as a father, and someone to look up to. “Speaking Indifferently to him, / who had driven out the cold”(10-11) is saying that they really did not know how to communicate with each other. I feel that the boy will regret not having and knowing what it is that makes you who you are, and may never get a chance to have and hold a special bond with his father and having a relationship with a person that can not be held with anyone else. This would bring an enormous amount of sadness to my life had I not had my Dad there to guide and protect me, when I could have used tremendous support and security.

conversation. It isn't like a poem at all. It says "By god the old man

Robert Hayden’s poem describes the relationship between a father and a son by speaking about what occurs on Sundays during the winter. It’s filled with dark words such as “blueblack,” “cold splintering,” “chronic angers,” and “lonely (offices)” to describe the narrator’s father and the atmosphere around his house. The father seems to give off a feeling of regret and tiredness, could be with his life or the position he is in at the moment. Right off the bat, the man the narrator describe reminded me of my grandfather. A lovable and caring man but often caught with a straight face and came across in a harsh, strict manner. And just like the narrator comes across, I thought he wasn’t the kind man everyone saw him as. I thought of him as a hard