Death of a Naturalist is concerned with growing up and loss of innocence

Death of a Naturalist is concerned with growing up and loss of innocence

Death of a Naturalist” is concerned with growing up and loss of

innocence. The poet vividly describes a childhood experience that

precipitates a change in the boy from the receptive and protected

innocence of childhood to the fear and uncertainty of adolescence.

Heaney organises his poem in two sections, corresponding to the change

in the boy. By showing that this change is linked with education and

learning, Heaney is concerned with the inevitability of the

progression from innocence to experience, concerned with the

transformation from the unquestioning child to the reflective adult.

The poem opens with an evocation of a summer landscape which has the

immediacy of an actual childhood experience. There is also a sense of

exploration in “in the heart/Of the townland;” which is consistent

with the idea of learning and exploration inevitably leading to

discovery and the troubled awareness of experience. To achieve this

Heaney not only recreates the atmosphere of the flax-dam with accuracy

and authenticity, but the diction is carefully chosen to create the

effect of childlike innocence and naivety. The child’s natural

speaking voice comes across in line 8; “But best of all”. The

vividness of his description is achieved through Heaney’s use of

images loaded with words that lengthen the vowels and have a certain

weightiness in their consonants;

“green and heavy-headed Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge

sods.”

The sound of the insects which, “Wove a strong gauze of sound around

the smell” is conveyed by the ‘s’ and ‘z’ sounds but also,

importantly, acts like a bandage preventing the spread of decay. The

images of decay, “festered”, “rotted”, “sweltered” and “the punishing

sun” do not seem to trouble the boy in this first section (although

they do prepare us for the second section and the loss of innocence);

he takes a delight in the sensuousness of the natural world. The

onomatopoeic “slobber” effectively conveys the boy’s relish for the

tangible world around him. We can further see how he views this world

by the words “clotted” and “jellied”; to the boy the frogspawn is like

cream and jam, something to be touched and enjoyed.

In section two everything changes. This change is marked by

differences in tone, diction, imagery, movement and sound. The world

is now a threatening place, full of ugliness and menace. However, it

is not the world that has changed so much as the boy’s perception of

it. There is still a strong emphasis on decay and putrefaction, but

now it is not balanced by images suggesting the profusion of life. The

sounds are no longer delicate (line 5), but are “coarse”, “bass” and