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By Seamus Heaney. 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. Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun. Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles. Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell. There were dragonflies, spotted butterflies,
“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.
Death of a Naturalist (1966) is a collection of poems written by Seamus Heaney, who received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. The collection was Heaney's first major published volume, and includes ideas that he had presented at meetings of The Belfast Group.
- Seamus Heaney
- 1966
In this poem, ‘Death of a Naturalist’, Heaney conjures a richly evocative image of the countryside, focusing on this flax dam where all the action takes place. He creates such a sensory journey that even the most uninitiated city dweller feels a keen sense of the beating heart of the countryside.
- Female
- English And French Teacher
Heaney’s sly, unsettling “Death of a Naturalist” tells the story of a bad experience that transformed the speaker’s childhood fascination with nature into fear and awe. The “Naturalist ...
The title poem in Heaney’s debut poetry collection Death of a Naturalist, published in 1966, ‘Death of a Naturalist’ is a deceptively simple poem about how the fascination and curiosity we feel in early childhood gives way to fear and disgust when we reach adolescence.
Oct 9, 2023 · 'Death of a Naturalist' is a blank verse poem that looks back on childhood, contrasting a boy's innocence with that of disillusionment in the perception of nature. The death is metaphorical: the boy loses his love of nature when fear invades his mind because of the menacing frogs 'cocked on sods'.
