The Irish poet Seamus Heaney conveys his constant amazement at the abilities of his family members in a plethora of his poems. In the poem "Follower", Heaney boasts that his father was a digger and longs to follow the family tradition, which in his poem "Digging" he concludes by stating that he can "dig" in his own sense by writing. In “Clearances #5,” the poet is in awe of his mother's ability to create papers out of simple flour sacks. Heaney's work emphasizes the importance of family life through his continuous use of repetition and caesura. Heaney highlights the use of repetition in numerous works. In “Digging,” the poet begins by eliciting an image of the speaker sitting at a desk with a “stubby pen” in his hand, perhaps pondering what to write (line 2). The poet has a flashback to the past where he imagines his father and grandfather digging potatoes. “Digging” shows Heaney’s “struggle to reconcile his vocation as a writer with the expectations of his family” (Vendler 93). He compares his lineage's work as a digger to his current writing work. He finds comfort by using repetition in the last stanza to return from his flashback and conclude that he will continue the family tradition by metaphorically "digging in" with his writing. Some say that Heaney's “proposal to engage in a poetic excavation” is nothing more than an “ironic continuity of his role” as part of the family (Kearney 37). We also note the redundancy of the phrase “old” (lines 15-16), used to describe the phenomena of which the poet's entire lineage has been excavators. Heaney points out that in this ancestry of diggers; he was the first to move away from the family job and become a writer. However, he remains in touch with his “roots” (Line 27) committing to having the…next steps even after his mother's death. Additionally, the comma after “before” (line 11) indicates a contrast to the speaker's life with his mother before their shared experience with the experience while folding papers. Both instances demonstrated the impact this event had on the speaker. Repetition and caesura had a huge impact on each other in the development of Heaney's poems "Digging", "Follower" and "Clearances Sonnet #5". These, among other literary techniques, are what make Heaney's work unique and distinguishable from other pieces of poetry. In addition to his plethora of literary elements, Heaney establishes the constant theme of his family as recurring throughout his work. However, unlike typical poets, Heaney refrains from writing the usual overly sentimental poems instead describing events in which he felt emotionally connected to his family..