In Digging, the first two lines:
"Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun."
These two lines compares a poet's pen and gun as a simile where the pen might not be as strong as a gun, but it has its own power like a gun does. The gun is a small object, but packs a punch within itself. The pen may seem small and powerless, but in reality just as the gun, it is small, but is actually more powerful than one may think. In the poem, the speaker isn't trying to say that the pen is mightier, but just as on an equal level of that of a gun. Also the poet is trying to get across a message through writing poetry with his pen, which is merely as effective as a gun threatening someone to clearly get one's message understood. The picture presented in this portion of writing is actually a stinger gun pen, where it may look like a harmless pen, but when used right, it can transform into a gun and have a powerful impact.
The metaphor Heaney tries to get across is comparing the spade and the pen. These two tools are being used for the same purpose ("digging") in the poem.
The metaphor is basically saying that the spade is the pen where the speaker will use the pen to dig just as his father and grandfather did with an actually spade, which represents their hard work and labor that makes up one's identity. The only difference is that poet doesn't have "[any] spade to follow men like them," so the poet uses a pen to "dig" to pass on his tradition with and through his writing. This image here represents a person using a spade digging whereas the pen can do the same "digging" resulting in a metaphorically imagery of a spade being a pen.
3 comments:
I really like how you looked at the pen as sort of a shovel for the speaker. How the speaker doesn't become a digger, but he still is using the same determination and will power in his writing.
I really like the pictures you picked to represent Heaney's poem. It really makes the poem's meaning more clear. The poem was very unclear to me the first time I read it, but I understand better with your explaination. It is true someone can "dig with a pen just as well as with a spade. With time, things change and so does tradition, so like you said, the son does not have a spade to dig with like his father and grandfather before him, so instead he uses his creative writing talent to "dig."
I like how you compared the pen to a gun in how a pen can actually have more power than a gun, and because of that, feel so snug. This clears up the gun metaphor we didn't really resolve in class. I enjoyed your images, and I like how the pen comes down as a giant object looking more powerful than a shovel in the second image.
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