At A Potato Digging

... At a Potato Digging Monday 17th March 1) Write four brief and simple paragraphs explaining the subject matter of each of the four sections of the poem. In Section I a spinner (which is a machine once used for spinning the potatoes out of the ground) moves across the field. The labourers follow the machine, picking up the potatoes and putting them into baskets. It is cold; the worker's fingers are dead with cold. Every so often they take their full baskets back to the pit to empty them. In Section II Heaney writes specifically about the potatoes. They lie on the ground; some of them are "flint-white" and some are "purple". Sometimes potato crops were blighted (by a fungus) making the whole crop fail, and in earlier days this resulted in famine as the population relied on the potato harvest for food. But in this case the crop is a "clean

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