Compare and contrast Death of a naturalist and Catrin

Compare and contrast Death of a naturalist and Catrin

In both poems, the writers reflect on childhood and change. Heaney

looks back on his childhood and the change he took while growing up

where as Clarke is reflecting on childhood as an adult, a mother and

how she copes, and her views of having a child, and being in child

birth.

In Heaney’s poem, Death of a Naturalist, he is reflecting on his

childhood and the attitude he uses towards his childhood. The attitude

he has changes during the poem, at first, in the first stanza, he

looks back fondly at his childhood

‘I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied specks to range on the window

sills at home’ (line11)

‘But best of all there was the warm thick slobber’ (line 8)

This shows how much he likes nature and how much interest he has for

it, how he even likes the ‘thick, warm slobber’. The style and voice

of this stanza is happy and childlike. We can tell it is childlike by

the way it is written, using long sentences and the repetition of the

word ‘and’,

‘Miss Walls would tell us how the daddy frog was called a bullfrog

and how he croaked and how the mammy frog laid hundreds of little eggs

and this was frogspawn’ (line 15)

But in the second stanza it changes, the tone of the stanza is less

happy; it is serious and uses many negative phrases

‘Then one hot day when fields were rank’ (line 22)

‘Right down the dam gross - bellied frogs were cocked’ (line 27)

And also fearful is the tone ‘I knew that if I dipped my hand the

spwan would clutch it’ (line33)

He shows he now no longer likes nature ‘I sickened, turned and ran’

(line31) that is the change.

In Clarke’s poem ‘Catrin’ she has mixed feelings of her child

throughout ‘In the glass tank clouded with feelings’ (line19).

In the first stanza it is before she has given birth and she tells it

as a fight ‘our first fierce confrontation’ (line7) Representing the

birth.

‘Red rope of love which we both fought over’ (line 8) This is

obviously the umbilical cord.

She does not look fondly upon giving birth as she shows it as a fight

‘Our struggle to become separate’ (line 16) Nor does she seem fond of

the child after it is born in the second stanza, she shows she is in

battle even though the birth has finished

‘Neither won nor lost the struggle’ (line 18)

‘Tightening about my life’ (line26). But although she shows she

doesn’t seem to like the child she loves it ‘trailing love and