Death of a Naturalist

Death of a Naturalist

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. You do not need to know what a flax-dam is to appreciate

the poem, as Heaney describes the features that are relevant to what

happened there - but you will find a note below. Click here to see

this explanation.

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 one day 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 overwhelmi...

... middle of paper ...

...hers of the young to explain how animals

live by describing them in human terms, like "mammy" (mum or

mummy) and "daddy"?

* How well does this poem fit in with your ideas of what poetry

should normally be like?

* How truthful is the title? Did Heaney really lose his interest in,

and love of, nature. Or does the poem record only a dramatic

change of attitude, or something else? (Note, for example, that

the poem called Perch was published in 2001.)

* Does this poem have anything in common with other poems by Heaney?

How far does it fit into a pattern of poems that show him not to

be a real country person (like his father and grandfather) -

because he can't dig, he can't plough, he gets upset when the

blackberries start rotting and he is frightened by a lot of frogs?