The Spade and the Pen

Imagery is one of the most powerful tools a poet has. With imagery a poet can paint the picture of his or her emotions. Poets can use something that holds relevance in the lives of many to convey something much more abstract. Without this tool, it would be much more difficult to illustrate to the reader what love feels like or to describe places that many have never even seen. In many poems there are often multiple images but one that is especially important to the meaning of the poem. This image can be used to show the theme and to give meaning to the reader.

There are two main images that are used as two tools with the same purpose in the poem Digging by Seamus Heaney. At the beginning of the poem, Heaney uses the shovel to exemplify hard manual labor. The “spade,” as he calls it, is used by his father to plant potatoes and by his grandfather to dig down to the retrieve the best peat.

The image I used to represent this is a painting by Van Gogh that shows a man, back hunched, surrounded by bare earth. This is how I envision the speaker's father and grandfather, heavily concentrated on their work and their bodies suffering from their devotion to farming.

The way that both his father and his grandfather use the shovel leaves the speaker in awe of their skill. The speaker however, does not possess equal skill with the spade. He does his work with a pen. However, much like his grandfather used the spade for digging down to get the best peat the speaker uses his pen to dig down to express emotions through his writing. Not only this but the pen also acts as a way to plant things much like the shovel. Unlike the shovel, however, the pen will plant ideas rather than crops.

The image I used to show the author's use of the pen is one of a hand, armed with a pen, drawing itself. This image shows how the speaker wants to write about his heritage and his family. In addition, this image shows how the speaker will be digging deep within himself to show his own emotions.

These connected images are heavily used throughout the poem to reflect the author’s point that people can use different tools to make an impact on the world. Whereas the speaker’s family has, in the past, used farming as a way to feed and warm people and to make a living, the speaker, himself will use his pen to reach out to people and to express his own emotions. The pen in this poem acts as the speaker’s shovel, capable of piercing the surface level to get to something deeper. He describes his grandfather as “going down, down/For the good turf. Digging.” This is exactly what the speaker hopes to do with the pen that acts as his shovel. He wants to get to the best emotions, the best feelings in order to make his work better.