Death of Naturalist

8/2/2019 Death of Naturalist

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Seamus Heaney was born in Northern Ireland and was the eldest if nine children. Heaney’s father was a

farmer in a rural county Derry and much of Heaney’s poetry, including death of a naturalist is about the

countryside and farm life of his childhood.

Death of a naturalist describes the exploits of a young Heaney collecting frogspawn. He remembers

being fascinated by the frogspawn and recollects his teacher telling him about frogs in school. Howeverin the second half of the poem, when the boy returns to the flax – dam, he feels threatened and

disgusted by the frogs. His interest in nature has died, hence the title of the poem :death of a

naturalist”. The two verses could stand for innocence and experience.



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The poem, like Seamus Heaney's work, is very nature minded in terms of context. However, he describes the frogs in a

very evil, sinister, and menacing way. It is about a child who collects frog spawn from the dam and collects it in jars.

He is innocent and unaware of the evil that lurks in the frog spawn. We can see in the poem that the boy is young,

when he remembers his teacher teaching him about the frogs, and his way of calling the frogs ‘ Daddy frog' and

‘ Mammy Frog'.

http://www.oppapers.com/essays/Death-Naturalist-Analysis/63636






The poem heavily appeals to the senses, which describes the more sinister parts of nature. Because when people think

of nature they usually think of the more beautiful parts of it (e.g. mountains etc.) The poems appeal to senses shows

how filthy and grubby nature can be describing the sight, smell, sound, and touch. All of them bring out another

grueling picture in the mind.

Heaney uses onomatopoeia to appeal to the sound part of the senses. Words like slap, pop, slobber, farting,

and croaked illustrates the realism of how the flax-dam is. The use of using onomatopoeia is to describe the nature

and the surroundings, and to show the uncertainty that is going through the boy's mind in the second stanza. Sibilant

sounds are also used in the poem. Words like slap, slime, sods, and spawn show the uncertainty and the tension that

the boy is under. Heaney also uses stop sounds to show his frightful and uncertain mood (Bluebottles, Poised,

Grenades, Mud, Farting, Blunt, Kings, Vengeance etc). This stops the reader from flowing which gives a sense of

uncertainty.

Heaney uses the description of the frogs to convey the uncertainty that the boy is feeling. He describes the frogs as

‘ … angry', ‘ … gross-bellied' (which also uses stop sounds). They are described as having ‘ … loose necks' and

‘ … blunt heads, farting'. This is used to describe the boy's abhorrence he has for the frogs. He refers to the frogs as

‘ … great slime kings', which shows, in the boy's imagination, that the...

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Death of a naturalist is about the effects of human beings tampering with the environment. The loss

that the child experiences is a metaphor for the loss that humanity will suffer from when the

environment seeks revenge for all that has happened to it.

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I feel the poem Death of a Naturalist is split into two sections. Firstly about a young innocent Heaney

who is excited about learning new facts about frogs and explores the textures of its spawn. In contrast in

the second section Heaney is a little older now and portrays a much more dull and almost paranoid view

of the environment. This is because he uses words such as \"cowdung\" and \"gross\" which show a

disgusting but more aware view of nature. As oppose to playful words like \"jampotfuls\".

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I think the tone is more humorous than serious, and although a \"rite of passage\" may be inferred, it\'s

a fairly light-hearted one. Heaney intentionally overstates the experience in the title.

It\'s hard to take a poem too seriously that features \"blunt heads farting\" as a central image. Perhaps

the boy has an extremely active imagination, which is a charming reality in many young children.

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“Death of a Naturalist” by Seamus Heaney is essentially an elegy concerning the loss of childhood

imperatives. Heaney betokens his disillusion to the oblivion of simple childhood joys by dividing “Death

of a Naturalist” into two figurative timeframes: prior to the loss and after. Through his strangely

attractive descriptions, Heaney encapsulates the delights of children in amateur herpetology, with such

lines as ‘bluebottles / Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.’ The departure from this simple

childhood fascination is explicit in the lines ‘Then one hot day when fields were rank / With cowdung in

the grass the angry frogs / Invaded the flax-dam.’ Frogs are no longer of interest: there are more serious

matters at hand to the mind of the adult. Through “Death of a Naturalist” Heaney bemoans his patently

seething belief with a passionate call to remember what has been lost by the coming of age.

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in my opinion seamus heaney created a successful poem that expresses all that is lost as we grow from

childhood, our curiosity and facsination for nature. however, it may seems that heaney blames our loss

of childhood innocnece on the actions on people around us, in this case metaphorically he blames the

nature and the great 'slime kings' and 'angry frogs' that 'invaded the flax dam'. the whole war like

imagery seems to reflect heaneys desire to fight for his field...or if u look at this more deeply, fight to

keep his childhood which seems to be disappearing with every 'coarse croak'. his new profound voice

which indicates coming of age and the beginning of the end of heaney's childhood chapter. M.H aged 16

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Personally i believe that this and blackberry picking both develop the idea of gaining and adult

perspective. The first stanzas set the scene, but the extended metaphors in each weave an undertone of

uneasiness, which is brought forward in the second stanza.I could be wrong - don't shoot me down, I

don't think that everyone here can claim to have the one and only right answer. I can however definitely

say that it does not refer to the (recent) irish troubles - the anthology, also titled death of a naturalist

was released in the early 60s, so before all of that.

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This can be linked closely with Blackberry-Picking as:

It shows the harshness of natureIt shows the good side of natureIt shows Heaney as a child

There is a sense of decay at the start of the poem with the rotting ‘flax’ and a sense of oppressive heat ‘daily itsweltered there’ all together creating an unpleasant feeling.

The sun seems like an oppressive leader ‘punishing sun’ inflicting pain on all beneath it.

The onomatopoeia of ‘bubbles gargled delicately’ creates a calm image, where everything moves slowly due to theheat.

The blue bottles are attracted to the smell of the rot, adding to the unpleasant picture.

Added to this is the key of the poem, the frogspawn which is described in a more favourable manner to reflectHeaney’s fascination with it, as a child.

At school he would display his bottles full of tadpoles. There is child-like language used by Heaney to describe MissWalls, presumably a primary school teacher, telling the children the facts of life in an appropriate manner: ‘how thedaddy frog was called a bullfrog and how he croaked …’

There is also a reference to how the frogs help tell the weather, like an old childish tale.

The second stanza deals with the harsh side of nature again, on a day with rank fields smelling of ‘cowdung’. Herethe ‘angry frogs’ seem a threat and certainly not the pleasant ‘daddy’ and ‘mummy’ of stanza one. Nature has a darkside, with the frogs described in a number of unpleasant ways including

Alliteration: ‘coarse croaking’ the harsh ‘c’ sound creating a violence, adding to the unpleasant, threatening nature of the frogs to the child (Heaney).

http://www.revisionworld.co.uk/gcse/english/seamus-heaney/death-naturalist/analysis






Onomatopoeia: ‘the slap and plop were obscene threats’, here ‘slap’ and ‘plop’ are both hard and unpleasant, almostvulgar sounds, emphasising the vulgar, slimy nature of the procreating frogs.

Simile: ‘their loose necks pulsed like sails’ gives a sense of the movement of the necks of the frogs moving likesomething man-made. Sails can be large, which also makes this movement seem large and exaggerated.

‘Some sat poised like mud grenades’ is an explosive image which makes it seem like the frogs may explode at anytime, giving a sense of the movement of a typical frog, sitting quite still then suddenly leaping to their next place ofrest. This all adds to the dangerous and angry image of the frogs here.

metaphor ‘their blunt heads farting’ is a gross, unpleasant image, making the sound of a fart link to the noise thecroaking frogs make, which makes it seem natural but unpleasant and disgusting (also linking to the rotten smell).

They are described using personification as ‘great slime kings’ as if they are the most powerful slimy things you couldimagine, superior to all other things and they are gathered ‘for vengeance’ so there is a huge sense of threat that theywill do immense damage.

The final image is of Heaney’s fear of touching the frogspawn and it clutching at his hand, almost aggressive, like thefrogs and overpowering.

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When the boy leaves the frogs at the end of the poem, he is changed, and the disillusion he

feels from his experience has become another step on his "metamorphosis" to adulthood.

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This poem is similar to Blackberry-Picking in its subject and structure - here, too, Heaney

explains a change in his attitude to the natural world, in a poem that falls into two parts, a sort of

before and after. But here the experience is almost like a nightmare, as Heaney witnesses a

plague of frogs like something from the Old Testament.

The poem's title is amusingly ironic - by a naturalist, we would normally mean someone with

expert scientific knowledge of living things and ecology (what we once called natural history),

someone like David Attenborough, Diane Fossey (of Gorillas in the Mist fame) or Steve Irwin

(who handles dangerous snakes). The young Seamus Heaney certainly was beginning to know

nature from direct observation - but this incident cut short the possible scientific career before it

had ever got started. We cannot imagine real naturalists being so disgusted by a horde of

croaking frogs.

The poem has a fairly simple structure. In the first section, Heaney describes how the frogs

would spawn in the lint hole, with a digression into his collecting the spawn, and how his teacher

encouraged his childish interest in the process. In the second section, Heaney records how oneday he heard a strange noise and went to investigate - and found that the frogs, in huge numbers,

had taken over the flax-dam, gathering for revenge on him (to punish his theft of the spawn). He

has an overwhelming fear that, if he puts his hand into the spawn again, it will seize him - and

who knows what might happen then?

The poem is set out in two sections of blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter lines). Heaney

uses onomatopoeia more lavishly here than in any poem - and many of the sounds are very

http://www.teachit.co.uk/armoore/poetry/heaney.htm#blackberry






indelicate: “gargled”, “slap and plop” and “farting”. The lexicon is full of terms of putrefaction,

ordure (excrement or faeces) and generally unpleasant things - “festered”, “rotted”, “slobber”,

“clotted water”, “rank/With cowdung” and slime kings”.

In the first section, the poet notes the festering in the flax-dam, but can cope with this familiar

scene of things rotting and spawn hatching. Perhaps, as an inquisitive child he felt some pride innot being squeamish - he thinks of the bubbles from the process as gargling “delicately”. He is

confident in taking the frogspawn - he does it every year, and watches the “jellied specks”

become “fattening dots” then turn into tadpoles. He has an almost scientific interest in knowing

the proper names (“bullfrog” and “frogspawn”) rather than the teacher's patronizing talk of

“daddy” and “mammy”, and in the idea of forecasting the weather with the spawn. (Not really

very helpful, since you can see if it is raining or sunny by direct observation - no need to look at

the frogspawn.)

The second section appears like a punishment from offended nature for the boy's arrogance -

when he sees what nature in the raw is really like, he is terrified. This part of the poem is

ambiguous - we see the horror of the plague of frogs, “obscene” and “gathered...for vengeance”,as it appeared to the young boy. But we can also see the scene more objectively - as it really was.

If we strip away the effect of imagination, we are left with a swarm of croaking amphibians. This

may bring out a difference between a child in the 1940s and a child in the west today. The 21st

century child knows all about the frogs' habitat and behaviour from wildlife documentaries, but

has never seen so many frogs at close range in real life. The young Heaney was used to seeing

nature close up, but perhaps never got beyond the very simple account of “mammy” and “daddy”frogs. The teacher presents the amphibians as if they were people.

The arrival of the frogs is like a military invasion - they are “angry” and invade the dam; the boyducks “through hedges” to hide from the enemy. Like firearms, they are “cocked”, or they are

“poised like mud grenades” (a grenade is a hand-bomb - the frogs, in colour and shape, resemblethe Mills Hand Bomb, used by British soldiers from the Great War to modern times).

The poem has some echoes of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner - in a

shorter and more comic version: the would- be naturalist is, like the mariner, revolted by “slimythings”; the Ancient Mariner learns to love them as God's creatures. Heaney indulges in a riotous

succession of disgusting descriptions: “gross- bellied”, “slap and plop”, “obscene threats”

(suggesting swear words), “farting” and “slime kings”.

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Heaney’s poem ‘Death of a Naturalist’ focuses on his experience of collecting and watchingfrogspawn as a child, and his reaction when the spawn turned into frogs.

In the first ten lines of the poem Heaney uses vivid imagery to describe the setting and itssights, smell and sounds. The phrase ‘flax-dam festered’ in the opening line combinesassonance and alliteration, and begins to create the atmosphere of decay. ‘Heavy headed’at the end of the second line again uses assonance and alliteration in one phrase todescribe the flax that had rotted. The heaviness is emphasised further in the third line,where the flax is ‘weighted down by huge sods’. The idea that hot weather has caused the

http://www.thehistorywriters.net/poetry-analysis-death-of-a-naturalist-by-seamus-heaney/






decay is expressed in line four: ‘Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun’, a personification of the oppressiveness of the sun. A gentler image focusing on sound is created in ‘Bubblesgargled delicately’ in line five. The movement of flies is described with a metaphor:‘bluebottles / wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell’, a fascinating imagecombining different senses. Line seven hints at the beauty of the scene with its ‘dragonflies,spotted butterflies’.

In line eight Heaney makes the first mention of frogspawn with the metaphor ‘warm thickslobber’, which as a child was ‘best of all’ to him among the offerings of nature. In line ninehe uses the simile ‘grew like clotted water’ to describe his impression of it. The poem thenswitches to an account of how Heaney collected frog spawn every spring, filling ‘jampotfulsof the jellied / specks’, imagery that again combines alliteration and assonance. The jarswere arranged both at home and at school, then carefully observed as the specks turnedinto ‘nimble-/swimming tadpoles’ – another example of assonance.

Lines fifteen to twenty-one (the end of the first stanza) are a very childlike account of howthe schoolteacher, Miss Walls, taught Heaney’s class about frogs and frogspawn. Simple,

childish language features in this section, such as ‘the mammy frog laid hundreds of littleeggs’; there are four clauses each joined by ‘and’ in this sentence, just as though it werewritten by a child. The final sentence of the first stanza continues in the same style, tellingus that frogs are yellow in sunny weather but ‘brown / In rain’. The last, brief two-word lineof the first stanza seems to underline the fact that this is the end of a period of innocenceand that a change is forthcoming.

The second stanza of twelve lines is much shorter than the first and has a very differenttone; the feeling of change is signalled by the opening phrase ‘Then one hot day’…Unpleasant imagery begins with fields described as ‘rank / with cowdung’. At the end of linetwo and the beginning of line three the frogs are seen as ‘angry’ and have ‘invaded the flax-dam’: they have taken over in a war -like gesture. As Heaney approached he heard a‘coarse croaking’ that was a new sound in that setting; in line twenty-six he uses themetaphor ‘The air was thick with a bass chorus’ to describe how the sound filled the place.Frogs are everywhere and they are ugly, ‘gross-bellied’, pictured with assonance in thephrase ‘cocked / on sods’. Their flabby necks are described by Heaney with the simile‘pulsed like sails’. The sound of their movements is expressed by onomatopoeia: ‘slap andplop’, which obviously disgusted Heaney who felt that these were ‘obscene threats’. In linethirty their stance is described by the simile ‘Poised like mud grenades’, an image thatechoes the war-like connotation of the word ‘invaded’ in line twenty-four. Heaney againvoices his distaste for the sound of the frogs in the phrase ‘their blunt heads farting’. Hecould not face them, and in line thirty-one he ‘sickened, turned and ran’, such was hisrevulsion. He personifies them as ‘great slime kings’ and in the following line states that

they had assembled at the flax-dam for revenge: ‘gathered there for vengeance’ for stolenfrogspawn. Heaney’s final line expresses how far his imagination as a child took hold: ‘if Idipped my hand the spawn would clutch it’. This is a nightmare image where the spawnbecomes powerful and grabs the child, reversing the original roles.

The structure of the poem, where the first stanza is almost twice the length of the first,resembles that of Heaney’s ‘Blackberry-Picking’. Both poems describe an enjoyablechildhood experience in the first stanza which turns sour in the second, linking form to















meaning. The feeling of disillusion and disappointment following pleasure is a commontheme in these two poems. ‘Death of a Naturalist’ links language to meaning as well, thevivid imagery of the second stanza creating a marked contrast with the simple, childlikewording of lines fifteen to twenty-one. There is a wealth of description here and we cansympathise with the child’s disgust of the creatures that evolved from his precious jars of frogspawn.

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Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Death of a Naturalist’ mainly focuses on Seamus’ experience of collecting and watching

frogspawn as a child followed by his reaction on metamorphosis of the f rogs from ‘jellies specks’ He loses his

innocence. This poem’s title is an extended metaphor. The naturalist in Seamus dies as he experiences the

transformation from a child to a man. It’s a comparison between the metamorphosis and the transformation of the

tadpoles and the child into frogs and a man respectively.

Heaney's poem 'Death of a Naturalist' focuses on his experience of collecting and watching frogspawn as a child, and

his reaction when the spawn turned into frogs.

In the first ten lines of the poem Heaney uses vivid imagery to describe the setting and its sights, smell and sounds.

The phrase 'flax-dam festered' in the opening line combines assonance and alliteration, and begins to create theatmosphere of decay. 'Heavy headed'

at the end of the second line again uses assonance and alliteration in one phrase to describe the flax that had rotted.

The heaviness is emphasised further in the third line, where the flax is 'weighted down by huge sods'. The idea that

hot weather has caused the decay is expressed in line four: 'Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun', a personification

of the oppressiveness of the sun. A gentler image focusing on sound is created in 'Bubbles gargled delicately' in line

five. The movement of flies is described with a metaphor: 'bluebottles / wove a strong gauze of sound around the

smell', a fascinating image combining different senses. Line seven hints at the beauty of the scene with its 'dragonflies,

spotted butterflies'.

In line eight Heaney makes the first mention of frogspawn with the metaphor 'warm thick slobber', which as a child

was 'best of all' to him among the offerings of nature. In line nine he uses the simile 'grew like clotted water' to

describe his impression of it. The poem then...

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In the poem "Death of a Naturalist", Seamus Heaney seems to suggest that humanisation and

simplification of essentially foreign and incomprehensible phenomena often occurs through

education and authority. Through the dramatic contrast in tone and diction between the first and

second stanzas, Heaney emphasizes how observations of the harsh reality and threat of natural

hierarchies can shatter childlike naïveté and admiration for the apparent simplicity and ordered

structure of nature. This notion is already implied in the title, "Death of a Naturalist," suggesting

that a realisation of the grim realities and aggression in natural structures can abruptly end these

simplifications; that it can shatter the child-like awe and elementary understanding mankind

tends to have towards an alien entity such as nature.

In the first few lines of the poem, Heaney immediately creates a sense of apparent order and

humanity in the natural situation he is describing. Through the use of alliteration in "flax" and

"festered" in the first line "heavy headed" in the second and by personifying the flax as "heavy

headed" and the sun as "punishing," he establishes connotations in the reader's mind of a

structure and reality that is understandable in human terms (a type of hierarchy which is easily

accepted by a child). This feeling is further intensified in the following lines of the poem, with

http://www.oppapers.com/essays/Commentary-On-Death-Of-A-Naturalist/851398






http://www.writework.com/essay/commentary-death-naturalist








the alliteration of "bubbles" and "bluebottles," and further alliteration in the personification of

the bluebottles as having "wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell." The image of the

"warm thick slobber of frogspawn," which is described as "best of all" and stressed by the simile

"that grew like clotted water," aids Heaney to introduce a notion of superficial understanding and

admiration of nature on a shallow level. The fact that the narrator is evidently speaking in a

child's voice...

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Death of Naturalist

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