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The life of a Digger
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The Life of a Digger
Khushmeen Kaur
Meaning of the Poem
This poem is about equality and issues such as racism. It is written from the perspective of a digger that comments on how terrible and unfair the working conditions are for the person, conveyed through the use of metaphors and similes.
Poetic Devices
"My hands feel like scorpion claws,
clamped on to a hard hard shovel all day"
The use of metaphor of "hands feel like scorpion claws" shows how hard he works as he compares his hands to 'scorpion claws' and the lack of human softness due to harsh working.
The repetition of 'hard hard' emphasizes the continuous, daily nature of his work.
This image in the poem shows the path of the labor trains that the thousands of workers have to travel in to dig in the snake pit. The endless depiction of the track symbolizes the unending, long nature of work that the workers have to do everyday on a daily basis.
"At dawn, the steaming labor trains
deliver us by the thousands, down into
that snake pit where we dig
until my muscles feel
as weak as water
and my backbone
is like shattered glass."
Topic 4
This image in the poem represents the unfair and gruesome work that the workers are forced to do through the tired muscles that are represented by the dark shade and composition used of the arm pointing up, further evident in the quote, "until my muscles feel as weak as water."
More poetic devices
"At lunchtime, we see sunburned
American engineers and foremen
eating at tables, in shady tents
with the flaps left open....how they sit on nice chairs"
"We have no place to sit. Not even
a stool. So we stand..."
The use of contrast between how engineers and foremen and workers eat at lunchtime, further shows the inequality experienced by the Jamaican workers due to their culture. This is evident as the American engineers and foremen sit on 'nice chairs' but the Jamaican diggers have "no place to sit." This juxtaposition shows the unequal treatment and racism experienced by the Jamaican workers.