“It is well known that in Europe that concept of landscape and words for it in both Romance and Germanic languages emerged around the turn of the sixteenth century to denote a painting whose primary subject matter was natural scenery” (Olwig, 2002: p. 10) . “Land is inherent in the word, and space suggests a view or picture, the aspects of what the eye sees when looking in any direction: and the word is redolent of the open air” (Praeger, 1953: p. 1) . In fact, landscape is not only confined to what can be seen by eyes, it includes all the human senses impressed by outer natural world. Although landscape is objective in its existence, as a cultural imagination which is constructed, it is with strong subjective color. Therefore, landscape can be viewed a kind of cultural image as well as constructed human passions. Landscape as natural scenes also provides ways of taking an image of country as the place of community and space of emerging nation-state. As a cultural image, landscape is related to cultural politics, geopolitical memory and emotional experience, and plays an important role in constructing “imagined community”. As landscape’s role in constructing “imagined community”, language of a certain nation is of great importance in ideology, politics and constructing “imagined community”. Anderson (1991: pp. 145-147) thinks the “imagined nation” can summon a strong sense of historical destiny in people’s hearts. Meanwhile because of the characteristics of promordialness and privacy, language is the vital medium of “imagined nation”. Its vogue origin and difficulty in textual research attribute to language’s primitive and natural power. Therefore, language carries political motive, and has a close relationship with the emergence of nation-state and national identity construction. “What the eye is to the lover―that particular, ordinary eye he or she is born with―language―whatever language history has made his or her mother-tongue―is to the patriot. Through that language, encountered at mother’s knee and parted with only at the grave, pasts are restored, fellowships are imagined, and futures dreamed” (Anderson, 1991: p. 154) . Both landscape and language play vital role in constructing “imagined communities”. Nation-state is not only the outcome of political struggle, it is but also closely related to landscape, language and culture in which people can find the roots of national identity.
Heaney's use of language in this poem is vivid, using imagery that appeals to multiple senses to evoke a sense of landscape and place. At the beginning of the poem, he sets the scene deftly through only the sparse, precise detail of "the squat pen" resting "between my finger and my thumb"; this is sufficient to create a picture of the speaker at a desk, writing. The window through which he then "looks down" is assumed to be the window of a study or the poet's writing room. Through the window drifts "a clean rasping sound," the adjective rounding out the initial setting with a quasi-onomatopoeic aural element, a sound we all recognize, a spade in "gravelly ground."
This sound transports the speaker, too, to a time "twenty years away" when his father was to be found digging potatoes. Heaney uses synecdoche to create a sense of memory: as in our memories we recall fine details which describe the whole, so Heaney details separate parts of his father which all stand in for the man himself. His "straining rump," "stooping in rhythm," "the coarse boot," and "the inside knee" generate a picture of a man active at work. The detail of the potatoes' "cool hardness in our hands" adds a further sensory depth to the memory, the alliteration in this line emphasizing it as an important part of the scene described.
Heaney's landscapes, like those in our memories, are not visual alone. The active verbs he uses to describe his grandfather's actions—"nicking and slicing," "heaving," "going down and down," "digging"—create a sense of continuous rhythmic action, like digging itself. The words "nicking" and "slicing," too, have sound connotations, much as the onomatopoeic "squelch and slap" evoke the "soggy peat" in which the speaker's grandfather dug. Specific sounds, such as the "curt cuts of an edge / through living roots," are aligned with alliteration: we imaging these "curt cuts" producing the same brisk sound the repeated c- sound suggests. The reference to "living roots," also, seems to have a dual connotation, referring both to the living roots of trees in the bog and to the living roots of a family, three generations of which are described in the poem.
Heaney is the living fruit of his family tree, but he cannot dig like his father and grandfather, "men like them." Instead, he uses repetition to draw our imagination back to the setting depicted at the very beginning of the poem, reminding us once more of the indoor scene of the writer: "Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests." There will be no digging in bogs for the speaker, but the work of his pen represents is a different, more metaphorical type of digging, into his own past.
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