Death of a Naturalist: A study of Seamus Heaney’s first book of poems.
Seamus Heaney, the famed Irish poet, was the product of two completely different social and psychological orders. Living on “a small farm of some fifty acres in County Derry in Northern Ireland” (Nobel eMuseum), Seamus Heaney’s childhood was spent primarily in the company of nature and the local wildlife. His father, a man by the name of Patrick Heaney, had a penchant for farming and working the land. Seamus’ mother Margaret, in contrast, was a woman born into a family called McCann, who’s major dealings were with business dealings, trade and “the modern world” (Nobel eMuseum). Patrick Heaney was a man of few words, and preferred the quiet life of a farmer to the vocal world of trade and industry. Margaret Heaney was in fact quite the opposite and believed in speaking out, being heard and was seldom shy in expressing her feelings (Nobel eMuseum). These two extreme contrasts were enormously influential in the shaping of Seamus as a man and as a poet, and his first book Death of a Naturalist is a testament to this. Death of a Naturalist focuses on nature and wildlife as well as human emotions, and using poetry as his medium, Seamus Heaney shows his readers with specific reference to love and death, the images of nature that are associated with his father, and intertwines them with the human feelings and emotions that are closely linked with his mother.
Love is a prominent theme in Seamus Heaney’s first book of poems, and it is worthwhile noting that just one year after Heaney married the love of his life, a woman named Mary Devlin, that Heaney wrote and released Death of a Naturalist (Nobel eMuseum). It might be confusing for one to imagine a relationship between the wild and natural world and a human characteristic such as love, but Seamus Heaney manages to bring the two themes together in a deeply poetic and fitting fashion.
In the poem Twice Shy, love is the governing premise. Twice Shy revolves around the idea of new lovers playing a game of hunter and the hunted, and with references to both nature as well as human emotions, Heaney displays the influences that were instilled in him as a young man by his parents. In the second stanza, the influence is unmistakable as Heaney describes a situation in which two lovers are trying to conform to the traditions of courting, but are consumed ...
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...ons in drills.” (Heaney 23). The men aboard the drifting ship are starving to death and demand to be fed by the captain, but when he refuses them food, “in whines and snarls their desperation / Rose and fell like a flock of starving gulls” (Heaney 23). By describing the men’s eyes as being like “spring onions” and by comparing the men as being like birds, Heaney brings nature into a mix of human feeling once more, thus creating a poem where impending death can be a topic that is both animalistic as well as human and emotionally expressive.
Within Death of a Naturalist, Seamus Heaney explores many different aspects of life in Ireland. With his constant references to both the natural world and the very different topic of human emotion, Seamus Heaney designed a book of poems that shows readers that a connection between the two can exist. Death of a Naturalist is a book that in a totally unique way bonds love, death, nature and emotion in a fashion that echoes both Patrick and Margaret Heaney’s dominant character traits.
Works Cited
Heaney, Seamus. Death of a Naturalist. Chatham, Kent: Faber and Faber Limited, 1999.
“Seamus Heaney Biography” Nobel eMuseum.
November 15, 2001.
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... Nature, including human beings, is `red in tooth and claw'; we are all `killers' in one way or another. Also, the fear which inhabits both human and snake (allowing us, generally, to avoid each other), and which acts as the catalyst for this poem, also precipitates retaliation. Instinct, it seems, won't be gainsaid by morality; as in war, our confrontation with Nature has its origins in some irrational `logic' of the soul. The intangibility of fear, as expressed in the imagery of the poem, is seen by the poet to spring from the same source as the snake, namely the earth - or, rather, what the earth symbolizes, our primitive past embedded in our subconsciouness. By revealing the kinship of feelings that permeates all Nature, Judith Wright universalises the experience of this poem.
In "Death of a Naturalist" we find that the poem is about being out in
Nature is often a focal point for many author’s works, whether it is expressed through lyrics, short stories, or poetry. Authors are given a cornucopia of pictures and descriptions of nature’s splendor that they can reproduce through words. It is because of this that more often than not a reader is faced with multiple approaches and descriptions to the way nature is portrayed. Some authors tend to look at nature from a deeper and personal observation as in William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”, while other authors tend to focus on a more religious beauty within nature as show in Gerard Manley Hopkins “Pied Beauty”, suggesting to the reader that while to each their own there is always a beauty to be found in nature and nature’s beauty can be uplifting for the human spirit both on a visual and spiritual level.
Elegy in a Country Courtyard, by Thomas Gray, can be looked at through two different methods. First the Dialogical Approach, which covers the ability of the language of the text to address someone without the consciousness that the exchange of language between the speaker and addressee occurs. (HCAL, 349) The second method is the Formalistic Approach, which allows the reader to look at a literary piece, and critique it according to its form, point of view, style, imagery, atmosphere, theme, and word choice. The formalistic views on form, allow us to look at the essential structure of the poem.
Through the ingenious works of poetry the role of nature has imprinted the 18th and 19th century with a mark of significance. The common terminology ‘nature’ has been reflected by our greatest poets in different meanings and understanding; Alexander Pope believed in reason and moderation, whereas Blake and Wordsworth embraced passion and imagination.