Digging languageThe poem starts in the present tense. In the first line you find out that the poem is personal because of the word "my". The unusual simile "The squat pen rests, snug as a gun" is odd

... Digging language The poem starts in the present tense. In the first line you find out that the poem is personal because of the word "my". The unusual simile "The squat pen rests, snug as a gun" is odd because guns are not thought of as snug In the second stanza the man hears a sound from "under his window." The poet uses onomatopoeia to describe the sound, which gives us a sense of hearing and being able to imagine the "rasping" sound. There is also alliteration with "spade sinks" and "gravely ground." The persona knows what the "rasping" sound is without even looking down, probably because he has got used to hearing it over the years. This is because sound is shown to trigger off memories in this poem. The third stanza begins with the reader being told what the noise was. It says that the father is working on the flowerbeds,

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