The Spade And The Pen: The Passion Of Life

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The Spade and the Pen: The Passion of Life In the poem “Digging”, the author, Seamus Heaney, recalled his father and grandfather’s painstaking, yet rewarding work on growing potatoes and cutting turf. The persistence and passion emanating from the author’s father and his grandfather inspires him to a passion of writing. Through an implicit metaphor, the sentence at the end of the poem: “I’ll dig with it” (31) suggests that the author’s “squat pen” is his “spade”, and the purpose of that metaphor is to expresses his determination of using the pen as a spade to record life and sticking to it forever. At the start of the poem, the speaker emphasizes the importance of a pen to him- just like a gun towards a soldier by using gun as a vehicle of pen (2), the “spade”—which was an important tool to his fathers before him, in the author’s case is his pen. The spade symbolizes the passion the author’s forefathers had in their work and the passion the author has for his work is symbolized by his pen. The author attempts to relay the passion between his father and his work to grow potatoes to the reader through statements like: “loving their cool hardness” (14). He invests time and emotion into his career, which has become a lifestyle. His grandfather is a passionate turf-cutter. When the author “carried him milk in a bottle” (19), he—the grandfather whilst working--“[drank] it, then fell to right away” (21). The author’s grandfather did not pause to chat or take a break from his labor and insists on “digging for the good stuff” (24). The spade is not only a tool for growing and living, but it is a tool of affection in life. The phrase in the beginning of the poem--“the squat pen rests” (2) reoccurs in the end (30) and creates a motif –the passion of life and writing--in the

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