Give examples of imagery in the poem "Digging" by Seamus Heaney.

The imagery surrounds his father and the farmer he was. The speaker looks down, both away from and at his father, and describes a slip in time; his father remains where he is, but the poem slips twenty years into the past, indicating the length of his father's career as a farmer. The speaker emphasizes the continuity of his father's movement, and the moment shifts out of the present tense and into the past.

The speaker then changes his focus to his father's tools, saying, "The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft/Against the inside knee was levered firmly." These lines, describing how his father's shovel fits against his boot and leg, echo the first lines of the poem, which describe the speaker's fingers around his pen. The speaker then describes the picking of the potatoes using the pronoun "we," indicating that other characters populate this memory; possibly this refers to Heaney's siblings or his family in general. The tone is reverential toward the potatoes and the work.