Death of a naturalist annotated

Seamus Heaney

This guide is written for students and teachers who are preparing for GCSE exams in English literature. For a general introduction to poetry in the Anthology with extensive guidance for students and teachers, then please see the Introduction to the Anthology by clicking on the link below. On this page I use red type for emphasis. Brown type is used where italics would appear in print in this screen font, italic looks like this , and is unkind on most readers. Headings have their own hierarchical logic, too:.

Andrew has a keen interest in all aspects of poetry and writes extensively on the subject. His poems are published online and in print. Death of a Naturalist is a blank verse poem that focuses on the loss of childhood innocence. Heaney looks back to a time when he was a boy initially enthralled by the local flax-dam , an area of boggy water in his native County Derry, Northern Ireland. The first person speaker concentrates on the resident frog population and the frog life-cycle. There is a parallel between the life cycle of the frog and the development of the boy - here is an innocent child changing into a young adolescent, a world of delight and innocence transformed into one that threatens and disgusts. Heaney's language is typically rich in what have become known as clusters of sound - alliteration and assonance juxtaposed, the varied vowel and consonant sounds carrying different rhythms, the rise and fall, the mix of hard and soft.