The Full Text of “Death of a Naturalist”
The Full Text of “Death of a Naturalist”
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“Death of a Naturalist” Introduction
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“Death of a Naturalist” was written by the Nobel-Prize winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney. It was published in 1966 as the title poem of Death of a Naturalist, Heaney's first book of poetry. The book—and the poem—did much to establish Heaney’s reputation as the leading Irish poet of his generation. The poem meditates on the relationship between human beings and nature, and uses that relationship to explore the transition from childhood to adolescence. As the speaker grows up, his relationship to nature changes. Instead of enjoying the natural world with innocent curiosity, he finds it threatening and disgusting.
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“Death of a Naturalist” Summary
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All year, the swamp near the town decomposed. Flax was rotting there, the heavy head of the plant still green, weighed down by huge balls of dirt. Every day it moldered under the hot sun. Delicate bubbles came up from the swamp and flies buzzed around, mixing sound and smell. There were dragonflies and butterflies, but my favorite thing was the warm, thick coat of frog eggs that lay in the shadow of the banks like clumpy water. Every spring, I’d fill jam jars with the eggs and leave them on the windowsills at home and at school, waiting and watching until they became quick, swimming tadpoles. My teacher, Miss Walls, told us how the male frog was called a bullfrog, how he croaked. And she told us that the mother frog laid hundred of eggs—and that’s called "frogspawn." And you could even predict the weather from watching the frogs, because they turn yellow in the sun and brown in the rain.
Then one day when the fields stank of cow droppings in the grass, the angry frogs invaded the swamp. I came running there through the hedges and heard a loud, raw croaking I hadn’t heard before. The air resounded with their deep voices. All the way down the banks, the frogs were sitting on lumps of earth. Their expanding necks were like sails filling with the breeze. Some of them hopped into the water. To me, the sound of their bodies slapping against the water was like a disgusting threat. Others stayed on the bank, sitting there like grenades made of mud, their square heads burping and burbling. I grew queasy. I turned and ran away. These kings of slime were gathered there for revenge and I knew that if I put my hand into the water, the frog eggs wouldn’t let me pull it out.
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“Death of a Naturalist” Themes
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Innocence and Experience
“Death of a Naturalist” is a poem about growing up—specifically, the fraught transition between childhood and adolescence. It describes childhood as 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. But, in the second stanza, the speaker’s relationship to the “flax-dam” and its creatures changes. They stop being enthralling and delightful, and instead become disgusting and frightening. This transformation serves as a metaphor for the transition from the innocent and unthreatening world of childhood to the disturbing, threatening world of adolescent sexuality.
In the first stanza of the poem, the speaker reflects on what it was like to be a child. The speaker felt joy exploring the swampy “flax-dam” at the heart of town. A flax-dam is an artificial pond used to store and ferment flax. It’s potentially a disgusting place: full of rotten, stinky flax. But the speaker doesn’t seem bothered by the smell of the “fester[ing]” flax-dam. Instead, the speaker loves to explore the pond and study all the different insects and reptiles that make it their home: “dragonflies, spotted butterflies,” and “the warm thick slobber / Of frogspawn.” The speaker takes real pleasure in the clouds of fertilized frog eggs that hatch in the pond—capturing and studying them, watching them “burst, into nimble / Swimming tadpoles.”
In other words, the speaker is fascinated with life itself: the natural rhythms of birth and growth. And that fascination includes—up to a certain point—sex. The speaker calmly repeats the teacher’s explanation of frog reproduction, apparently undisturbed by it—though, of course, the teacher uses simple, childlike language to explain the sex lives of frogs. For instance, she calls them “mammy” and “daddy.” The speaker isn't threatened by sex for a simple reason: it’s so foreign that the speaker doesn’t really understand it.
But, in the second stanza, the speaker’s attitude toward the dam, and the animals in it, changes. Indeed, the dam itself has changed in important ways: there are more frogs, and they’re louder and more aggressive. In this way, the poem suggests that time has passed—and in that time, the speaker has undergone an important transformation. Where the speaker once took pleasure in the frogs, now they’re described as disgusting, foul-smelling, offensive. They are “obscene threats,” and the speaker emphasizes their capacity for violence: they are like “mud grenades.”
As a result, the speaker, “sickened,” runs away from the flax-dam. The speaker can no longer tolerate the smell of the place and the mess of the frogs who live there. Indeed, the speaker fears that “if I dipped my hand” into the pond—as the speaker did without hesitation in the first stanza—“the spawn would clutch it.” This line is key to understanding the poem. The speaker is afraid of coming in contact with the “frogspawn” and being tainted, or contaminated, by it.
In this sense, the poem tracks a change in the speaker’s relationship to sex, which is represented by the frogs. In the first stanza, the speaker regards sex with the innocent curiosity of a child. In the second, the speaker’s attitude changes: sex becomes gross and threatening. But the speaker can’t go back and restore the uncomplicated joy of the first stanza. As the poem ends, the speaker is trapped in the world of adolescent sexuality with no clear way out.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-33
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Human Beings and Nature
“Death of a Naturalist” is, in part, about the relationship between people and the natural world. As the title suggests, the speaker starts off the poem (at least metaphorically) as a “naturalist”—a kind of scientist who closely studies nature. The speaker thus feels separate from the natural world: it’s something the speaker observes, not something the speaker participates in. But, as the speaker grows up—becoming an adolescent and learning more about human sexuality—it becomes clear that the speaker isn’t actually separate from nature. The speaker participates in the same natural cycles that the frogs do. This realization is part of what causes the speaker’s fright and disgust in the second stanza: the speaker wants to flee from the nature, to cease to participate in it.
At the start of the poem, the speaker is someone who observe nature's rhythms and cycles with a clinical, scientific interest—or so the speaker thinks. The speaker describes studying the life cycle of the “frogspawn” in the pond, the way they move from egg to tadpole to frog. The speaker enjoys learning the details of this cycle, but doesn’t feel particularly threatened or upset by them. This is partially due to the speaker’s scientific attitude. The speaker is, metaphorically, a “naturalist,” someone who studies nature for scientific inquiry. This creates a certain hierarchy: the speaker is a scientist, and nature is the thing that speaker studies. They are separate from each other.
That separation collapses in the second stanza. The speaker starts to personify the natural world more regularly. The frogs seem “angry,” seeking “vengeance” against the speaker for stealing their frogspawn. It's as if the natural world and the human world are blending into each other. Furthermore, instead of simply studying and observing the natural world, the speaker reacts to it viscerally and emotionally. It makes the speaker “sickened,” and the speaker runs away from the flax-dam in horror. The speaker has ceased to be a “naturalist.” Indeed, the distinctions between the speaker and the natural world have broken down.
This change is related to the broader transformation the poem describes: from childhood to adolescence, and from innocence to experience. As the speaker learns about sex, the natural world—with its cycles of birth, growth, and death—ceases to seem so distant, so separate. Instead, the speaker recognizes the way in which human life is also wrapped up in those cycles. Learning about sex doesn’t just change the speaker—it also radically alters the relationship between the speaker and the natural world.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-33
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Death of a Naturalist”
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Lines 1-6
All year the ...
... around the smell.The first six lines of “Death of a Naturalist” establish the poem’s setting and begin to hint at its themes. The speaker spends these lines describing a “flax-dam.” A “flax-dam” is a small pond or swamp that farmers use to soften flax, weighing them down with “huge sods”—heavy lumps of dirt. They leave the flax in the swamp for several weeks, during which time it starts to rot or “fester” (and some of the flax gets left behind and rots there all year). As a result, the “flax-dam” is a stinky and vibrant natural space.
The speaker uses imagery to convey the smell and sound of the place. The rotting flax “swelter[s]” in the sun every day; it releases “Bubbles” that burble up from the depths of the swamp. And bluebottle flies constantly buzz around it. The “bluebottles” hint at some of the complicated dynamics that will unfold over the course of the poem. They are carrion flies that feast on dead and decaying animals and plants. Thus, they are symbols of death. Their presence here suggests how complicated life is: even as the “flax-dam” is a space of incredibly vibrant life, it is also haunted by death.
Further, the “bluebottles” are hard to ignore. They create a sound so loud that it seems to the speaker to be a “strong gauze of sound” in line 6. In other words, this metaphor suggests their buzzing is so powerful that it seems to be a material, physical thing. And the alliterative /s/ sound in the line—“strong gauze of sound around the smell”—is itself powerful, almost physical. It gives the reader a hint of what the “flax-dam” sounds like. Similarly, in line 2, the speaker uses a sharp, queasy assonant /ee/ sound—in “green” and “heavy”—to capture the rank smell of the swamp.
As line 6 suggests, the poem is powerfully alliterative, full of loud, prominent alliterations. These alliterations recall the kind of poetry written in medieval times in England and Ireland—poetry that used patterns of alliteration as its central formal device. The poem is connected to this deep tradition in English-language poetry; it summons that tradition into the present.
At the same time, however, the poem is written in blank verse, meaning it uses unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter. Blank verse is a distinguished, prestigious meter: it's the meter that Shakespeare and Milton used. But the poem's meter is consistently rough. Arguably, none of these lines are metrically regular. Further, the poem's lines often end with alliterations, like "heart" and "headed" in lines 1 and 2 or "sods" and "sun" in lines 3-4. These alliterative pairs aren't strong enough to count as rhyme—but they do serve to remind the reader that the poem could rhyme, though it never quite makes the leap.
Finally, the poem is also highly enjambed. Only lines 4 and 6 are end-stopped here. The speaker favors enjambment for different reasons in different parts of the poem. Here it conveys the energy and enthusiasm of the speaker’s curiosity about the “flax-dam.” And it also suggests some of the complicated feelings that the “flax-dam” will eventually inspire in the speaker. For instance, the poem’s first line, “All year the flax-dam festered in the heart” could be read as a complete sentence in itself—in which case, the state of the “flax-dam” would be a metaphor for the state of the speaker’s heart. The next line makes it clear that the reader shouldn’t take it that way—but the possibility is tantalizing, and hints at things to come in the poem.
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Lines 7-10
There were dragonflies, ...
... of the banks. -
Lines 10-15
Here, every spring ...
... Swimming tadpoles. -
Lines 15-21
Miss Walls would ...
... In rain. -
Lines 22-26
Then one ...
... Before. -
Lines 26-30
The air was ...
... blunt heads farting. -
Lines 31-33
The great slime ...
... would clutch it.
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“Death of a Naturalist” Symbols
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Bluebottles
Literally speaking, “bluebottles” are a species of fly. They mostly feed on animal dung and the decomposing carcasses of dead animals. As a result, they also have a subtle symbolic resonance when they appear in line 5: they symbolize death and decay. This symbol balances the poem a little bit. In the first stanza of the poem, the speaker generally focuses on the early stages of life, specifically the newly spawned frog eggs that grow into tadpoles. The speaker is fascinated by birth and growth, studying them with an almost scientific fervor. The bluebottle flies, as a symbol, serve as a subtle reminder that birth is only part of the story—death is also an important part of the cycle of life.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Line 5: “bluebottles”
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Frogspawn
As the speaker explains in lines 18-19, “frogspawn” is a thick layer of frog eggs that covers the surface of the “flax-dam.” In the poem, however, “frogspawn” acquires symbolic connotations alongside this literal meaning: it symbolizes human sexuality and sexual reproduction.
It takes a while, though, for the speaker to fully develop this symbolic meaning. In the first stanza, the speaker approaches the “frogspawn” with the scientific detachment of a naturalist. Then, in the second stanza—when the speaker becomes an adolescent—the speaker no longer sees sexuality as something distant and separate. When the speaker considers dipping a hand in the frogspawn in line 33, the speaker worries “the spawn would clutch it," and the speaker will be trapped, tainted by it. As the speaker’s relationship to sexuality changes, the “frogspawn” takes on symbolic components, becoming a symbol for human sexuality.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Line 9: “frogspawn”
- Line 19: “Frogspawn”
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“Death of a Naturalist” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Enjambment
“Death of a Naturalist” is a heavily enjambed poem. Most of its lines are enjambed, in fact, and in the rare moments that end-stops do occur—especially in the second stanza—they don't necessarily feel like moments of rest and relief. Instead, it feels like the speaker is just pausing, in horror, to contemplate the "bass chorus" of the frogs (as in line 26: "Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.").
All this enjambment has a powerful effect on the reader’s experience of the poem. The poem feels off-kilter, out-of-whack—like it’s almost out of control. In different parts of the poem, the enjambments have different specific effects. In the first stanza, for example, they convey the breathless excitement of a curious child. The reader gets a sense of this in the first three lines of the poem:
All year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.The first two lines are enjambed. That might be surprising: after all, they’re just descriptions; the speaker is setting the scene, explaining to the reader what the “flax-dam” is. But these lines don’t have the measured, careful quality of description. Instead, they feel breathless and excited because of the way they keep sliding across the line breaks. The enjambments convey the energy and excitement the speaker feels just thinking about the “flax-dam.”
And the enjambments also open up possibilities for interpretation. The first line of the poem, for instance, is grammatically complete in itself. The reader could take it as a complete statement—“All year the flax-dam festered in the heart”—in which case, the flax-dam would be a metaphor for what’s going on in the speaker’s heart. The enjambment into the next line makes it clear that the reader shouldn’t read the first line as a complete statement. But, in the brief moment that the reader considers the possibility, the poem prepares the reader to see the “flax-dam” not just as a natural space, but as a metaphor for the speaker’s relationship with sexuality.
In the second stanza of the poem, the speaker’s attitude toward the natural world changes: anxiety and dismay replace curiosity and joy. The reader feels the speaker’s anxiety and confusion in the way the lines careen down the page, breathlessly, breaking in the middle of sentences. In lines 24-26, for example, the enjambments convey the urgency the speaker feels running toward the flax-dam:
... I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. ...One almost feels the speaker’s stomach dropping in these lines: their restlessness and energy conveys the speaker’s mounting anxiety.
Enjambment thus represents the speaker’s relationship with nature throughout the poem. In the first stanza, it embodies the speaker’s innocence and curiosity; in the second, the speaker’s anxiety and dismay.
Where enjambment appears in the poem:- Lines 1-2: “heart / Of”
- Lines 2-3: “headed / Flax”
- Lines 5-6: “bluebottles / Wove”
- Lines 8-9: “slobber / Of”
- Lines 9-10: “water / In”
- Lines 10-11: “spring / I”
- Lines 11-12: “jellied / Specks”
- Lines 12-13: “home, / On”
- Lines 13-14: “until / The”
- Lines 14-15: “nimble / Swimming”
- Lines 15-16: “how / The”
- Lines 16-17: “bullfrog / And”
- Lines 17-18: “frog / Laid”
- Lines 18-19: “was / Frogspawn.”
- Lines 19-20: “too / For”
- Lines 20-21: “brown / In”
- Lines 22-23: “rank / With”
- Lines 23-24: “frogs / Invaded”
- Lines 24-25: “hedges / To”
- Lines 25-26: “heard / Before.”
- Lines 27-28: “cocked / On”
- Lines 29-30: “sat / Poised”
- Lines 31-32: “kings / Were”
- Lines 32-33: “knew / That”
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Caesura
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Alliteration
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Assonance
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Consonance
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Metaphor
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Simile
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Imagery
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Personification
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Diacope
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"Death of a Naturalist" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Flax-dam
- Festered
- Townland
- Heavy headed
- Sods
- Gargled
- Bluebottles
- Slobber
- Frogspawn
- Clotted water
- Jampotfuls
- Jellied specks
- Range
- Fattening dots
- Mammy
- Cowdung
- Gross bellied frogs
- Cocked
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(Location in poem: Line 1: “flax-dam”; Line 24: “flax-dam”)
A pool or small swamp where bundles of flax are submerged for a few weeks to soften their stems. Flax is a crop grown for food and its fibers: people eat its seeds and make cloth from its stalks.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Death of a Naturalist”
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Form
“Death of a Naturalist” is 33 lines long, divided into two uneven stanzas: the first is 21 lines long; the second just 11. The poem doesn’t follow any other formal rules or schemes: it doesn’t have the tight rhyme scheme of a sonnet, for example. However, its division into stanzas is important because it mirrors the transformation in the poem’s speaker. The speaker starts off the poem as a child, innocent and enthralled by the natural world. In the second stanza, though, something radical changes: the speaker suddenly finds nature disgusting and threatening. That change is sudden, unexpected, and irreversible—the speaker can’t go back. The break between the first and second stanzas of the poem mirrors that shocking, sudden transformation. It happens in the middle of a line: two syllables into line 21, the line suddenly ends!
This breaks the poem’s meter as well: the next line, line 22 has only eight syllables (as opposed to the ten required of iambic pentameter, the poem's overarching meter). That means that line 22 completes the meter of line 21—but only across a break, a rupture. This break is as unexpected and as disruptive as adolescence itself. In this way, the organization of the poem’s stanzas reflects the transformation that the speaker undergoes in the poem.
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Meter
“Death of a Naturalist” is written in blank verse. That means each line is written in iambic pentameter, a meter with five iambs (poetic feet with a da DUM beat pattern) per line. The reader can hear this rhythm in line 13:
On shelves | at school, | and wait | and watch | until
Blank verse has a distinguished history. It’s the meter that Shakespeare uses in tragedies like Hamlet, that Milton uses in Paradise Lost; it’s one of the most important and prestigious meters in English poetry. (And, important for Heaney, an Irish poet, eager to build and sustain an Irish poetic tradition, it was a favorite meter of W. B. Yeats, possibly the most important Irish poet!)
However, “Death of a Naturalist” doesn't use this meter in a smooth, polished, or masterful fashion. In fact, line 13 is arguably the first line of the poem that doesn’t contain some serious metrical variation or blemish. That’s unusual: poets usually like to establish the rhythm of the poem, then deviate from it. But already, in the poem’s first line, there are some big problems in the meter:
All year | the flax- | dam fest- | ered in | the heart
The poem starts out alright, with two iambic feet. But it’s third foot, “-dam fest,” is a spondee (two stressed beats in a row). The next foot is a pyrrhic (two unstressed beats in a row), followed by a closing iamb. The line still has five stresses, like an iambic line should, but the arrangement of those stresses is unusual. In the center of the line, there are three stressed syllables in a row. With its strong alliteration on “flax-dam” and “festered,” the result feels less like the elegant patterns of an iambic line and more like a line written in alliterative meter—the meter used in medieval English poetry, before blank verse came to prominence.
This gives the poem a real sense of historical depth: it’s conversant with, on the one hand, Yeats and Hamlet, and, on the other, Anglo-Saxon poems like “The Seafarer.” In this way, the speaker suggests that the struggles it describes—growing up, coming to terms with sexuality—are part of the deep, underlying rhythm of human life: connecting people in the present to people who lived long ago.
More obviously, perhaps, the metrical awkwardness of the poem contributes to the sense that things are a bit off, that the speaker doesn't quite feel in controlled: the rhythm of the poem is hectic and unpredictable, just like adolescence itself.
However, the most important disruption of the poem’s meter happens in lines 21 and 22. Line 21 ("In rain") is just 2 syllables long; line 22 is eight syllables ("Then one hot day when fields were rank"). Together they form a single, rough line of iambic pentameter. But a stanza break divides them in two. This break happens at a key moment in the poem: it separates the speaker’s childhood and adolescence. The stanza break—and the disruption it introduces in the meter—thus reflects the sharp, unsettling transition from innocence to experience that the speaker endures.
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Rhyme Scheme
“Death of a Naturalist” is written in blank verse: unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter. As such, it doesn’t have a rhyme scheme—and that’s important for the poem. It’s a highly enjambed poem—with sentences skittering over the edges of one line and careening into the next. That gives the whole poem the feeling that something’s off-kilter, out-of-whack—and that the speaker isn’t quite comfortable. These enjambments are thus key to the poem’s energy and mood, and they are made sharper and all the more disconcerting by the absence of rhyme. If the lines were rhymed, that might give the line breaks a kind of clear justification (i.e., the lines would have to end in these random spots because that's where the rhyming word falls): they would start to feel natural and controlled. Instead, in the absence of rhyme, they feel chaotic, helter-skelter—as off-balance as the speaker.
Although the poem doesn’t use rhyme, it does often end its lines with alliterative words, like “heart” and “headed” and “sods” and “sun” in lines 1-4. These alliterations fall below the level of slant-rhyme: the words in question are too far apart. Instead, they feel like failed rhymes—words that almost rhyme, but don’t. In doing so, they remind the reader that the poem doesn’t rhyme. This poem, then, doesn’t just lack a rhyme scheme: it’s a poem in which the absence of rhyme feels like a failure, a small catastrophe, which reflects and amplifies the larger catastrophe of growing up, becoming an adolescent.
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“Death of a Naturalist” Speaker
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The speaker of “Death of a Naturalist” is someone reminiscing about childhood and the upsetting, disruptive transition to adolescence. For the speaker, growing up was traumatic and difficult. As a child, the speaker was innocent and enthusiastic, exploring nature—even though grossest parts of the natural world—with pleasure. As an adolescent, though, the speaker finds nature threatening and disgusting. This change in the speaker's relationship with nature reflects another change: a transformation in the speaker’s relationship with sexuality, as the speaker moves from innocence to experience.
Most readers assume that “Death of a Naturalist” is an autobiographical poem—and, at the very least it draws on Seamus Heaney’s memories of his childhood in rural Ireland. The poem is inflected with specific details—the sights and smells of the Irish countryside, with its “flax-dam[s],” "spotted butterflies," and "bluebottles." The speaker is absorbed in these rich, immediate details. As a result, the reader never learns how old the speaker is now—how long ago the speaker made this transition from childhood to adolescence. Nor does the reader learn the speaker’s gender or profession. Although the poem is rooted in Heaney’s childhood memories, its speaker is potentially a universal figure. The speaker’s experiences stand in for the disruption and dismay that almost everyone endures as they transition from childhood to adolescence.
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“Death of a Naturalist” Setting
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“Death of a Naturalist” is set in an unnamed rural area—likely in Ireland in the 1950s, when Seamus Heaney himself was a child living in the Irish countryside. The poem describes the environment of the countryside in vivid, specific detail. It focuses on a “flax-dam,” a small pond or swamp where farmers leave their flax for several weeks to soften it up. The pond is rich with natural life, full of “dragonflies, spotted butterflies,” and, most importantly for the speaker, lots and lots of frogs—and lots and lots of frogspawn, the eggs they release into the water.
It’s a stinky, gassy place, full of rotting plants. But, in the early part of the poem, that doesn’t bother the speaker—indeed, the speaker seems to kind of enjoy the squishy, dirty, stinky environment of the “flax-dam.” In the second stanza, though, the speaker finds it disgusting, even threatening—the frogs that fascinated the speaker become weapons of war, “mud grenades.” They are out “for vengeance.” What was once an innocent and fascinating place, has become disgusting and threatening. The place itself hasn’t changed—but the speaker has.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Death of a Naturalist”
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Literary Context
“Death of a Naturalist” was written in Ireland during the 1960s. Seamus Heaney, the poem’s author, is one of the most important Irish poets of the 20th century. Over the course of his long and distinguished career—he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996—Heaney worked to develop a distinctively Irish literature, a poetry that responds to the conditions of life in Ireland, that uses the kind of language that Irish people use, and that reflects the long tradition of Irish poetry.
This poem was first published in Heaney's collection of the same name. Many of Heaney's poems , including others in this collection, also tackle the pain of growing up and display a deep respect for and connection to the Irish countryside. "Blackberry-Picking," for example, focuses on the childhood memory of picking berries only to have them quickly fester and rot; both "Digging" and "Follower" explore Heaney's relationship with his father and to Irish farming traditions. The Scottish poet Carol Ann Duffy similarly looks at the fraught transition from childhood to adolescence, with a nod to tadpoles and frogs, "In Mrs Tilscher's Class."
“Death of a Naturalist” is specifically rooted in Irish rural life, describing the Irish countryside in vivid detail—down to the way it smells. It also revives two traditional ways of writing that have been important to Irish poetry: the use of blank verse and the use of heavy alliterations. Blank verse was key in the development of English poetry and was used extensively by Irish poets like W.B. Yeats; however, by the mid-20th century it had largely fallen out of fashion. Alliterative meters, in turn, were key to the poetry written in England and Ireland before the Norman conquest in 1066 A.D. The poem thus has unusual historical depths. Even as it describes scenes in the Irish countryside in the mid-20th century, it connects to poetic practices that stretch back into the middle ages. In this way, it suggests that the experience it describes—of growing up, becoming an adolescent—is universal, something that connects people across history.
Historical Context
First published in 1966, “Death of a Naturalist” was written at a troubled time in the history of Ireland. The country was ruled by the British. It was divided between Irish Catholics, who argued vehemently and sometimes violently for independence, and Irish Protestants, who supported British rule (and who often identified as British, rather than Irish)—often using violence themselves to protect it.
Seamus Heaney was a Catholic, but grew up in County Derry, in Northern Ireland. His work often reflects on the fractured and difficult history of his country—its struggle for independence, its deep and difficult questions about its own identity. “Death of a Naturalist” doesn’t allude directly to that historical context: its speaker is too absorbed in the difficulties of growing up, with all the discomfort that entails, to worry about the fate of Ireland. But the poem itself does participate in some of the struggles over Irish identity: reviving Irish literary traditions, creating an Irish way of writing poetry.
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More “Death of a Naturalist” Resources
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External Resources
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Seamus Heaney's Biography — A detailed biography of Heaney from the Poetry Foundation.
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"Death of a Naturalist" Read Aloud — Seamus Heaney recites his poem, "Death of a Naturalist."
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Heaney and Nature — This brief article discusses Seamus Heaney's relationship to nature in his poetry—touching on a range of poems from across his career.
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Heaney's 10 Best Poems — An introduction to Heaney's poetry from the Telegraph newspaper.
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"Death of a Naturalist" First Edition — A detailed essay on the publication of the first edition of Death of a Naturalist, including a number of photos from the book.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Seamus Heaney
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