Death of a Naturalist - Seamus Heaney Flashcards
when was this poem written?
1966
themes?
- power - this poem is about the power of nature or the powerlessness of childhood
- nature
- love - the persona of the poem has a passion and interest for nature
- time - a time in someone’s life, and change can only occur overtime
- man - this poem is about a child and human emotions
- death - the metaphorical death (the loss of innocence) is the point of this poem
what is the meaning of this poem?
- Heaney tells the tale of a child and their relationship with nature
- to start with, they are fascinated by nature and they collect ‘jampotfuls’ of frogspawn to ‘watch’
- however, one day, when the frogspawn has been replaced by the frogs, the child is terrified and loses their love for nature, showing the ‘death of a naturalist’
what is the mood of this poem?
- initially, the mood is one of fascination and passion, as shown by ‘best of all’
- however, the mood shifts to one of fear and terror as the child stumbles upon frogs ‘poised like mud grenades’, causing them to flee in panic
what was the motivation for the poet to write this poem?
- inspired by the death of his younger brother, Heaney often explores the loss of innocence in his poetry, as seen in the shift from fascination to terror in this poem
- furthermore, Heaney published this poem in the same year, he first became a father, meaning that he may have been meditating on his own childhood in rural Ireland
title: ‘Death of a Naturalist’
IMAGERY:
‘Death of a’ - this is metaphorical representing the death of someone’s passion or interest in nature; could also symbolise how things you appreciate as a child end as an adult and could be seen as a retrospective account of the loss of innocence or childhood
LANGUAGE:
‘Naturalist’ - is an expert or student of nature; someone who wants to care for their environment
‘heart Of the townland’
IMAGERY:
- having the flax-dam in the townland’s ‘heart’ stresses its importance to the community and persona
- nature and man seem to live in symbiosis
‘heavy headed’
‘weighed down’
‘huge’
IMAGERY:
- semantic field of heaviness
- the flax is heavy headed and personified in these lines
‘festered’
‘rotted’
LANGUAGE:
- language related to death and decay could foreshadowed the metaphorical death of the eponymous naturalist
‘flax-dam’ / ‘festered’ / ‘flax’
‘heart’ / ‘heavy headed’
‘sods’ / ‘sweltered’ / ‘sun’
STRUCTURE:
- the alliteration used in these lines creates a nursery rhyme tone, reflecting the persona’s youth
‘sweltered in the punishing sun’
LANGUAGE:
- nature at times is in war with itself
- the confrontational tone to this line could foreshadow the poem’s warlike ending
- although the poet is positive about nature, its potential threat is recognised in the early stages of the poem
‘Bubbles gargled delicately’
LANGUAGE:
- this oxymoron shows that the youthful persona finds pleasure in the most unusual or disgusting things, as many children do
- soundscape of the life in the pond
- personification of the bubbles
‘bluebottles’
‘dragon-flies, spotted butterflies’
‘frogspawn’
IMAGERY:
- this high image density of nature suggests it is alive and thriving, and the persona is fascinated by it as they notice so many of its aspects
- ‘bluebottles’ are also associated with death and decay
- a group of frogs is called an army which is militaristic language
‘But best of all was the warm thick slobber’
LANGUAGE:
- ‘best of all’ and ‘slobber’ are examples of childlike language, and have been used by Heaney to highlight the persona’s naivety and innocence
- ‘best of all’ is a superlative
‘grew like clotted water’
LANGUAGE:
- simile suggests that the water is thick with frogspawn which is a subversion
‘every’
LANGUAGE:
- the determiner suggests that the persona’s fascination with nature was long lasting as they collected frogspawn repeatedly of a number of years
- anecdotal
‘jampotfuls of the jellied’
STRUCTURE:
- the alliteration makes the persona’s passion seem natural - jellied substances probably belong in jam jars
- pluralisation of ‘jampotfuls’ suggests a large quantity
‘wait and watch until’
STRUCTURE:
- the alliteration draws attention to how absorbed the persona is in their passion as they would seemingly observe the frogspawn for hours
‘fattening dots burst’
IMAGERY:
- this imagery suggests nature is alive, thriving and full of energy
‘Miss Walls’
‘daddy frog’
‘mammy frog’
LANGUAGE:
- the persona’s youth and Irishness are demonstrated
- the persona’s naivety and innocence are also exemplified as they take ‘Miss Walls’ words as gospel and put total faith in what she has told them
- juvenile language
‘and’
STRUCTURE:
- the repitition of ‘and’ mimics the speech patterns of young children and also shows the persona’s enthusiasm and passion for nature in a stream of conciousness
‘rain’
LANGUAGE:
- rain usually has negative connotations
- Heaney could be hinting at something negative on the poems horizon
‘In rain.’
STRUCTURE:
- the abrupt ending of the line/stanza could foreshadow the abrupt metaphorical ‘death’ in the next stanza
- the approach towards the negative could be considered the poem’s volta
‘Then’
LANGUAGE:
- change in time to a specific event and a change in tone to something more serious, discarding its useful innocence
‘hot’
‘fields’
‘grass’
LANGUAGE:
- the setting and nature has not changed - the persona has
‘angry’
‘Invaded’
LANGUAGE:
- negative language choices show that the persona feels scared or uncomfortable
‘coarse croaking’
STRUCTURE:
- Heaney makes this phrase stand out by using alliteration in order to reflect how the sound of the frogs stand out to the persona, making them feel unsettled, nervous or intimidated
- consonant sounds
‘The air was thick was a bass chorus’
IMAGERY:
- ‘bass chorus’ symbolises the frogs croaking and nature is presented as strong, fearsome and impenetrable
- the frogs seem to have ganged up on the persona and they feel intimidated
- bass is the lowest sound which feels ominous
‘frogs were cocked’
‘pulsed like sails’
‘Poised like mud grenades’
IMAGERY:
- these images are unified by a semantic field of war, showing how nature and man have gone from being allies to enemies
- this also emphasises how threatened the persona feels
- adds to the confrontational tone of the second half of the poem as the child and frogs are now enemies
- the persona feels immensely threatened by the frogs
‘gross-bellied’
‘loose necks’
‘obscene’
‘blunt heads’
LANGUAGE:
- the negative tone from earlier in the stanza is continued; the very thing that the persona was fascinated by are now the things that disgust them
‘slap and plop’
STRUCTURE:
- these onomatopoeic words are called ‘threats’, emphasising the idea of the sounds of the frogs being the thing that scares the persona
‘I sickened, turned and ran’
LANGUAGE:
- this triadic structure and the quick succession of verbs highlights the persona’s reaction of terror or horror
- this contrasts with the descriptiveness of the rest of the poem; this could suggest the persona no longer has any interest in what nature looks like as they just want to leave
‘The great slime kings’
IMAGERY:
- this personification suggests that the frogs have power over the persona
- this is hyperbolic
‘if I dipped the hand the spawn would clutch it’
IMAGERY:
- this final nightmare-like image suggests that the change is permanent, and that the persona will never love nature again
poet context
- Irish poet, playwriter, translator, teacher and lecturer
- born in 1939 and died in 2013
- political writer
- as a child he liked to watch soldiers prepare for war
- massively acclaimed - won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995
- one of the most important and influential poets in the late 20th century
- grew up in rural Northern Ireland on his family’s farm
- he described his childhood as ‘an intimate, physical, creaturely existence…in suspension between the archaic and the modern’
- his younger brother, Christopher, was killed in a road accident at 4 years old, in 1953
- Heaney became a father for the first time in 1966, the same year his book ‘Death of a Naturalist’ (which contained the poem of the same name) was published
structure?
- 2 stanzas
- free verse poem
- no rhyme scheme
- there is a change in the second stanza
form?
- first poem narrator
