death of a naturalist

• Death of a Naturalist


  A poem about growing up, specifically the fraught transition between childhood and adolescence
• Childhood in the poem

  • A state of innocence and curiosity
  • The speaker gleefully explores the swampy "flax-dam" and thrills in the creatures that live there—butterflies, dragonflies, and tadpoles
• The speaker's relationship to the "flax-dam" and its creatures changes

  They stop being enthralling and delightful, and instead become disgusting and frightening
• Transformation in the poem


  Metaphor for the transition from the innocent and unthreatening world of childhood to the disturbing, threatening world of adolescent sexuality
• Frog reproduction described in the first stanza

  Teacher's explanation using simple, childlike language (e.g. "mammy" and "daddy")
• The speaker's attitude toward the dam and the animals changes in the second stanza

  The frogs are now described as disgusting, foul-smelling, and offensive "obscene threats"
• The speaker is afraid of coming in contact with the "frogspawn"

  Afraid of being tainted or contaminated by it
• The speaker's relationship to the natural world

  • Starts off as a "naturalist" - a scientist who closely studies nature, feeling separate from it
  • As the speaker grows up, it becomes clear the speaker participates in the same natural cycles as the frogs, causing fright and disgust
• The distinctions between the speaker and the natural world have broken down
• Learning about sex

  Radically alters the relationship between the speaker and the natural world
• Flax-dam


  A small pond or swamp that farmers use to soften flax, weighing them down with "huge sods"—heavy lumps of dirt
• Flax-dam process


  1. Farmers leave the flax in the swamp for several weeks

  2. Flax starts to rot or "fester"

  3. Some of the flax gets left behind and rots there all year
• The "flax-dam" is a stinky and vibrant natural space
• Death of a Naturalist

  A poem by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, focused on the loss of innocence and how intense passion for something can die in an instant
• The second stanza marks a change in time and tone

  The poem seems more serious, the persona's youthful innocence has been discarded
• Nature


  • Has not changed, the difference is in the persona's perspective
  • The language choices have become more negative, suggesting the persona feels scared or uncomfortable in nature
• Negative language used to describe the frogs

  • Gross bellies
  • Loose necks
  • Obscene noises
  • Blunt heads
• The images of the frogs

  Unified by a semantic field of war (e.g. "poised like mud grenades")
• The sounds of nature

  Unsettle and scare the persona
• Triadic structure in the final lines

  1. Highlights the persona's reaction of terror

  2. Contrasts with the rest of the poem's descriptive language
• Personification of the frogs as "kings"

  Suggests the frogs/nature have power over the persona
• The final line suggests the change in the persona's perspective is permanent
• Summary of the poem's meaning

  The poem explores the loss of innocence and how passion can die suddenly
• Summary of the poem's mood

  Fascination and passion in the first stanza, fear and terror in the second stanza
• Possible motivations for the poet


  The loss of his younger brother and the birth of his first child may have influenced his exploration of innocence and childhood
• Themes in the poem

  • Power
  • Nature
  • Love
  • Time
  • Man
  • Death
•  The “Naturalist” refers not to an actual scientific expert, but simply an inquisitive child.
• The death referred to is metaphorical; the loss of innocent enthusiasm in response to half-understood realities.
• The metamorphosis of the tadpoles into frogs is a metaphor for the change in the child’s perceptions and the awakening of sexual awareness.
• The break or volta, where the child loses innocence and becomes aware that life is not so simple, comes at the beginning of line 22, with ‘Then’.
• There is no regular rhyme scheme or metre, but instead Heaney uses enjambment, varied sentence length and varying pace to convey the nuances of the story.
• just how quickly can curiosity passion and obsession die let's find out
• Seamus Heaney's poem death of a naturalist can be found on page 14 of the wje C educast poetry anthology
• Seamus Heaney was an Irish poet who was born in 1939 and died in 2013
• Heaney was massively acclaimed and won numerous prizes and awards and honors in his lifetime including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995
• Heaney described his childhood as an intimate physical creaturely existence in suspension between the archaic and the modern
• Heaney's brother Christopher was killed in a road accident in 1953 and this had a profound effect on Heaney and his writing
• Heaney first became a father in the same year that he published this poem
• Naturalist

  An expert in or a student of nature, be that animal or plant life
• Nobody dies in this poem

  The title refers to the metaphorical death of the persona's passion for nature