Death of a Naturalist

DEATH OF A NATURALIST

Seamus Heaney published ‘Death of a Naturalist’ as part of a collection of poems of the same name. In this poem, Seamus Heaney explores the concept of growing up, changing perceptions and the loss of innocence that accompanies it. He does this through the eyes of a young boy, at first with excited anticipation as he treasures his ‘frogspawn’, which later changes to ‘sickened’ disgust as he realises what they are.

In its first stanza, the poem describes a swampy area and focusses on the frogspawn found there. This reminds the person of his childhood, where as his teacher taught him about frogs by collecting frogspawn and watching them hatch into tadpoles, and later frogs. In the second stanza, the person demonstrates how perceptions change with maturity and Heaney expands on the idea of the loss of innocence. The third and final stanza shows how everything has changed and been contaminated when he matured. He is now in the present and repulsed by the frogs.

The first stanza describes a smelly flax-dam in the middle of town, and recounts a memory of collecting frogspawn. In the opening lines of the poem, there is the words ‘all year’. This shows that these take place over time and are not immediate. The phrase also has similarities to fairy-tale diction as it establishes a time that is very broad and detached from reality. This gives the stanza a dream-like quality that further adds to the feeling of innocence. In this first line, Heaney also described the flax-dam as ‘festered’, which has connotations of deterioration and corruption and is usually used to describe rotting wounds. Through using this verb, Heaney has led the audience to anticipate that there is something sinister happening in the background. This idea continues through the stanza with the use of words like ‘gauze’. Later we see that this is the deteriorating childhood innocence. Heaney also shows how deep-seated this deterioration is by connecting it to ‘in the heart’. The singular definite article allows Heaney to show that there was a focal point of major significance. In western literature, the heart represents the centre of a person. So in essence, in this first line, Heaney is essentially saying that there is a decay over time that is focused on the very centre of person’s being. Heaney adds to the dreamy atmosphere of the first stanza by elongating the second line by using enjambment and a caesura. He also alliterates ‘f’ in the first line, and then the heavy ‘h’ sound in “heart…heavy-headed” and “jam pots full of jellied”. This carries with it the sense of excitement of the young person. The enjambment also allows the reader to stop and think about what is happening. This all contributes to the dreamy tone of the first stanza. Heaney continues subtly planting the idea of decay when he uses the word “sweltered” in the third line, and adds to this effect with the use of words like “gargled”, “clotted”, and “slobber”. However, he still maintains the dreamy tone by using words such as “gauze” (which has