Comparison of Sunlight and Digging of Seamus Heaney

Sunlight and Digging are two poems that were written by Seamus Heaney, an Irish born poet. Through those poems he talks about some of his memories of the past that he spent with his family members. They both describe how hard working they were and the physical strength they needed.

Digging is one of the famous poems of Heaney. In the twentieth century, the labours of everyday life were quite different as the ones of today. Most people were still living a rural life, and weren’t yet completely introduced to urbanization. In this poem we are left with his thoughts and feelings. Each stanza of this poem takes you further and further back in time, and with it progresses a good use of imagery. Therefore we can note that “Digging” is based on one of Heaney’s childhood memories. He talks with the outmost respect about the hard working attitude, and physical strength of his family members as they are digging in their fields. He loves and admires his grandfather and father, and by doing simple little tasks such as bringing his grandfather some milk in a bottle shows how much respect he has for his family. Heaney’s family is from Northern Ireland, which is well known for their potatoes. When we read the two first lines of the second stanza, one after the other, they sound quite similar although the words are different. It’s because they are similar in length, have similar rhythms, plus they rime at the end “sound” “ground”. We are settling in this pattern when Heaney directly takes us out of it with the next line. This line and the one that follows, by using “digging”, he introduces us to the job of his father: a potato farmer. We can than assume that the speaker is Heaney as his a writer and son of a farmer. We quickly find out that he’s also the grandson of a harvester, which means he comes from a line of diggers. He’s full of praise for them, and his being little hard on himself by saying he has “no spade to follow men like them”, because he doesn’t quite think that...