Ancestral Photograph Essay

606 Words3 Pages
Ancestral photograph is a poem written by Seamus Heaney. Seamus Heaney writes all his poems related to his personal life experiences. In this particular poem, he writes to express his emotions and feelings of his past life. He clearly describes how his daily life in the older times was and how he prefers it now. This poem was written while he put off a photo frame from the wall and This poem firstly is a first person poem with a complicated rhyme scheme. It has five verses with six stanzas each. The poet himself is the persona in this poem and has played this role as a little kid as he goes into flashback to relive his memories. He starts off in the first stanza by describing a tough bodied, arrogant rich Irish man with a non-living statue like appearance. This has been described in a metaphoric and symbolic way. Like, line two and line five say “Dead eyes are statue’s”, “two parts dead pan.” Both these lines suggest that the person in description has statue like features. The man’s richness is shown by the sixth line “His silver watch chain girds him like a hoop”. This shows the man’s richness. In the second stanza, the poet talks about his past generations while looking at a photo frame of his ancestors going off the wall. He sorely remembers how his father’s great uncle taught his father farming and grazing “My father’s uncle, from whom he learnt trade”. He uses the word “trade” as his family business farming. As the protagonist describes the fading of color of the wall, he uses a simile and imagery “As if a bandage had been ripped from skin”. This shows how different the two shades of paint on the wall looked now as he removes the photo frame off the wall and this feeling is acquired by the audience as they use their senses and imagine the bandage ripped off their skin. He describes it as a faded patch, meaning it had been there for long and now it’s
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