Discuss the main ideas and their presentation in ‘The Turnip Snedder’

The Turnip Snedder by Heaney presents four main ideas, including Heaney himself justifying act of violence, Heaney’s thinking about peace, war with its affect to modern word and remembering the past. Heaney associated manually driven turnip-crushing machine with these three themes perfectly in The Tunip Snedder. Heaneay mainly use description, allution, sarcasm and contrastion to convey themes to readers. Following passage will focus on the themes of The Tunip Snedder and methods Heaney used to present main ideas.

First Heaney uses descriptive languages to present his memory to the past. “In an age” refers to a bygone time, and words ”bare hands and cast iron” emphasis that at first work was done by people, not machine. The flowing stanza “the clamp-on meat-mincer, the double-flywheeled water-pump,” also points out the past and the machine use, and brings a little comparison of the past and now. These two stanzas are used to initiate the poem. It builds up a relatively melancholy and serious atmosphere to readers.

To illustrate war’s affect to modern world, in the first place Heaney uses military words “breast-plate”, “guard” and “greaves” to relate the war to the function of snedder. In fact the Turnip-sneeder is a metaphor of military machine that can turn soldiers into meat-mincer. He says that “’This is the way that god sees life,’it said,’from seedling-braird to sneeder’”, which pointsone of the themes that like the function of sneeder, war’s function is to cut and to kill by cutting. Moreover, Heaney presents his self-justifying of violence through describing snedder’s mind and behavior ironically. ‘This is the way the God sees life’, it said, ‘from seedling-braid to snedder,’ fully endow snedder with single minded, unintelligent mentality. As the handle turned and turnip-heads were left fall and fed creates a bloody metal-executor image for snedder. However, snedder does not realize that he has such a cruel career, and even derives pleasure from texture and colors of liquidization process of turnips, which symbolizes the meaning that snedder feels no sympathy towards death, but was cold, indifferent and apathetic.

Finally, Heaney shows readers his thinking about peace. Heaney presents this theme through description to contrasting phase of pease --- the war to arouse reader’s desire of keeping peace. As previous points show, snedder and turnips are emblems chosen to illustrate the war. Through Heaney’s description to turnip-crushing process, Heaney shows destruction that war causes on people and conveys his antiwar attitude. Heaney even uses Shakespearean lexis glistering in last line, which may convey a kind obsoleteness of the snedder itself. Reader may also get an idea that army as a killing group should be abolished to keep peace.

In conclusion, Heaney uses different ways and effective languages to present different themes including justifying act of violence, thinking about peace, war with its affect to modern word and remembering the past.