Seamus Heaney Vs. Robert Frost
Born in 1939 and still alive today, Seamus Heaney is an Irish poet brought up in County Derry who has had much success. He married in 1965 and in 1995 he won the prize for literature. One of Heaney’s collections is, Death of a Naturalist (1996) from which “Digging” is taken. Robert Frost was born in 1874 and died in 1963. He married Elinor White in 1895. He was a highly regarded poet and the fact that he won the Pulitzer Prize four times. He has a number of great collections such as, “New Hampshire”, “A witness tree and collected poems.” The poems I have chosen to study have the themes of choice and decision, “The Road not taken” by Robert Frost and “Digging” by Seamus Heaney and “Stopping by woods”.
“The Road Not Taken” is about making decisions in life, no matter how big or small they are you have to choose. In the poem Frost is met with two roads to choose from, two different paths, and two different outcomes. He says he chose one over the other because it had been worn less but goes on to say,
“Had worn them really about the same”, this may show he didn’t want to pick one just because of what others before him had done but he wanted to be a leader rather than a follower and chose the one he was drawn to. In “the road not taken” the words, “yellow wood” indicates its autumn and “yellow” is often a sign of calm or mellowness. Frost looks down each path two see what they may entail but to his dismay “the undergrowth” obstructed his view. We see Frost had to stand alone and make his decision,
“Be one traveller, long I stood” he had no help in making his decision and this is similar in Heaney’s poem, where he has to break away from family tradition.
Frost’s choice is universal as, every person has decisions to make in life and the path they chose may decide their fate or the outcome of the rest of their lives. Heaney’s poem is more personal as he grew up working on his father’s farm, which he enjoyed and respected his family for being good at it, as we see...
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