Death of a Naturalist Lesson Plan

In “Digging,” how do you interpret the relationship between the descriptions of the speaker’s hand and pen in the first and last stanzas? What does this comparison reflect about the author’s understanding of himself in relation to earlier generations?

In the first stanza, the speaker compares his pen to a gun, suggesting a more confrontational or aggressive interpretation of his intent for writing. In the last stanza—after spending the rest of the poem discussing and considering his father’s occupation and work ethic and then, likewise, his grandfather’s—the speaker analogizes his pen to something he can “dig” with (e.g., the spade and plows that his ancestors used in...