Death of a Naturalist - Seamus Heaney

Heaney's poem 'Death of a Naturalist' focuses on his experience of collecting and watching frogspawn as a child, and his reaction when the spawn turned into frogs.

In the first ten lines of the poem Heaney uses vivid imagery to describe the setting and its sights, smell and sounds. The phrase 'flax-dam festered' in the opening line combines assonance and alliteration, and begins to create the atmosphere of decay. 'Heavy headed' at the end of the second line again uses assonance and alliteration in one phrase to describe the flax that had rotted. The heaviness is emphasised further in the third line, where the flax is 'weighted down by huge sods'. The idea that hot weather has caused the decay is expressed in line four: 'Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun', a personification of the oppressiveness of the sun. A gentler image focusing on sound is created in 'Bubbles gargled delicately' in line five. The movement of flies is described with a metaphor: 'bluebottles / wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell', a fascinating image combining different senses. Line seven hints at the beauty of the scene with its 'dragonflies, spotted butterflies'.

In line eight Heaney makes the first mention of frogspawn with the metaphor 'warm thick slobber', which as a child was 'best of all' to him among the offerings of nature. In line nine he uses the simile 'grew like clotted water' to describe his impression of it. The poem then switches to an account of how Heaney collected frog spawn every spring, filling 'jampotfuls of the jellied / specks', imagery that again combines alliteration and assonance. The jars were arranged both at home and at school, then carefully observed as the specks turned into 'nimble-/swimming tadpoles' – another example of assonance.

Lines fifteen to twenty-one (the end of the first stanza) are a very childlike account of how the schoolteacher, Miss Walls, taught Heaney's class about frogs and frogspawn. Simple, childish language features in this section, such as 'the mammy frog laid hundreds of little eggs'; there are four clauses each joined by 'and' in this sentence, just as though it were written by a child. The final sentence of the first stanza continues in the same style, telling us that frogs are yellow in sunny weather but 'brown / In rain'. The last, brief two-word line of the first stanza seems to underline the fact that this is the end of a period of innocence and that a change is forthcoming.

The second stanza of twelve lines is much shorter than the first and has a very different tone; the feeling of change is signalled by the opening phrase 'Then one hot day'... Unpleasant imagery begins with fields described as 'rank / with cowdung'. At the end of line two and the beginning of line three the frogs are seen as 'angry' and have 'invaded the flax-dam': they have taken over in a war-like gesture. As Heaney approached he heard a 'coarse croaking' that was a new sound in that setting; in line twenty-six he uses the metaphor 'The air was thick with a bass chorus' to describe how the sound filled the place. Frogs are everywhere and they are ugly, 'gross-bellied', pictured with assonance in the phrase 'cocked / on sods'. Their flabby necks are described by Heaney with the simile 'pulsed like sails'. The sound of their movements is expressed by onomatopoeia: 'slap and plop', which obviously disgusted Heaney who felt that these were 'obscene threats'. In line thirty their stance is described by the simile 'Poised like mud grenades', an image that echoes the war-like connotation of the word 'invaded' in line twenty-four. Heaney again voices his distaste for the sound of the frogs in the phrase 'their blunt heads farting'. He could not face them, and in line thirty-one he 'sickened, turned and ran', such was his revulsion. He personifies them as 'great slime kings' and in the following line states that they had assembled at the flax-dam for revenge: 'gathered there for vengeance' for stolen frogspawn. Heaney's final line expresses how far his imagination as a child took hold: 'if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it'. This is a nightmare image where the spawn becomes powerful and grabs the child, reversing the original roles.

The structure of the poem, where the first stanza is almost twice the length of the first, resembles that of Heaney's 'Blackberry-Picking'. Both poems describe an enjoyable childhood experience in the first stanza which turns sour in the second, linking form to meaning. The feeling of disillusion and disappointment following pleasure is a common theme in these two poems. 'Death of a Naturalist' links language to meaning as well, the vivid imagery of the second stanza creating a marked contrast with the simple, childlike wording of lines fifteen to twenty-one. There is a wealth of description here and we can sympathise with the child's disgust of the creatures that evolved from his precious jars of frogspawn.

Blackberry picking - Seamus Heaney

This is one of Heaney's poems that centres on memories of his childhood, growing up on a farm in the Irish countryside. Here he recalls the annual experience of picking wild fruit in late summer.

Heaney uses assonance in his phrase 'glossy purple clot' to describe the first blackberry that ripened and stood out from others pictured with the simile as being still 'hard as a knot'. Heaney compares the taste of the first ripe berry to the sweetness of 'thickened wine'. He uses the metaphor 'summer's blood' to express the redness of the juice that led to a desire for more: 'lust for picking'. The reference to blood is the first suggestion of a less enjoyable or innocent experience.

The second part of the sixteen-line first stanza tells how they collected all the containers they could lay their hands on: 'milk-cans, pea-tins, jam-pots'. The rhythm of the list is repeated two lines later in 'hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills' whose bordering hedges offered the fruit for picking. Onomatopoiea in the phrase 'tinkling bottom' suggests the sound of the first few berries hitting the metal of the cans they were dropped into. An ominous picture is painted in the description of the ripe fruit on the top: 'big dark blobs burned like a plate of eyes'. Perhaps this reflects the vivid imagination of a child. The macabre imagery increases at the end of the first stanza, where Heaney uses the simile 'sticky as Bluebeard's' to describe the blackberry juice covering the palms of the children's hands as if it were blood, thus echoing the earlier metaphor of 'summer's blood'.

In the shorter second stanza, the pleasures of picking and tasting the first ripe berries soon fade away. The berries were 'hoarded' in the byre, but very quickly begin to go mouldy. The mould is described as a 'rat-grey fungus': the inclusion of the word 'rat' in the metaphor emphasizes the distaste of this deterioration. The smell and taste are focused on too. 'Stinking' makes no bones about the unpleasant smell, and the original sweet taste of the blackberries turns sour. The following line reminds us that the poet is speaking here as a child: 'I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair...' Then once again the smell is recalled: 'all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot'. In the last line, Heaney remembers that he always hoped the blackberries would last once they had been picked, but inside realised that this was impossible.

It is interesting to compare this with another poem of Heaney's, 'Death of a Naturalist'. Both of them centre on childhood memories that begin as innocent, pleasurable experiences rooted in nature, but both end in disillusion. Nature's beauty and sweetness do not endure. The desire for the experience ends in revulsion. There is even a parallel in the structure of the two poems with the extended first stanza followed by a more compact second one that describes a change, the moment of disillusion and disgust.

Heaney addresses all the senses with his imagery and hints here and there among his initial admiration and enjoyment that things are perhaps not all they seem. The innocence of childhood and the wonders of nature are transient, and disappointment has to be confronted.

Figures of Speech in Poetry

Anyone studying English Language and Literature has to be able to analyse poetry, and recognising figures of speech and being able to quote them and comment on them will make any essay more impressive. There again, actually using them yourself in creative writing or descriptive writing brings your work alive and gives it an extra dimension. Various figures of speech are explained here; the examples quoted are from the AQA Anthology for GCSE English Language and Literature (Specification A) for 2005 onwards. (The book is published by Oxford University Press but is only distributed in secondary schools; copies can sometimes be found on Ebay.)

ALLITERATION

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Alliteration is the repetition of consonants, usually at the beginnings of words in close succession.

Nissim Ezekiel uses this device in his poem 'Night of the Scorpion' in which the phrases 'stung by a scorpion' 'parting with his poison' describe his memory of the evening his mother was the victim of a scorpion's sting but thanked God it had chosen her and not her children. The 'drizzle of one despondent dawn' sets a dismal tone at the beginning of Nigerian poet Chinua Achebe's 'Vultures'.

Moniza Alvi uses alliteration in her poem 'Presents from my Aunts in Pakistan' which expresses her confusion at being of mixed nationality and not fully belonging anywhere. After moving to England, she hears of the conflict in Pakistan, which she describes as 'a fractured land/throbbing through newsprint'.

In her poem 'Anne Hathaway', Carol Ann Duffy imagines how Shakespeare's wife would have thought of him as 'My living laughing love'. Simon Armitage picks a more up-to-date character in 'Kid', where the narrator, Batman's sidekick Robin, has finally grown up and says Batman has 'let me loose to wander/leeward, freely'.

A very different atmosphere is created by alliteration in Walt Whitman's poem 'Patrolling Barnegat' describing a storm at sea: 'On beachy slush and sand spirts of snow fierce slanting'. Still threatening, but in a very different way, is Robert Browning's female narrator in 'The Laboratory', describing in minute detail the process as she mixes a poisonous potion to inflict upon her lover's new-found mistress: 'moisten and mash up thy paste,/Pound at thy powder'. A more majestic picture is created by Alfred Tennyson in his brief poem 'The Eagle': 'He clasps the crag with crooked hands;/Close to the sun in lonely lands'.

ASSONANCE

~~~~~~~~~~

This is the repetition of vowel sounds in words.

Seamus Heaney shows himself to be a grand master of assonance in his poem 'Death of a Naturalist' where he describes how 'gross-bellied frogs were cocked on sods'. The more poignant 'Mid-Term Break' tells how he was brought home from boarding school following the death of his four-year-old brother in a road accident. Waiting for neighbours to collect him from school, he hears 'bells knelling'; on the morning of the funeral he sees the body 'stanched and bandaged' and notices the bruise on the left temple.

In a similar vein, Gillian Clarke's 'Cold Knap Lake' recounts how a drowning child is pulled from the lake. She describes the murky depths of the water 'after the treading, heavy webs of swans' that she feels may hide other disturbing memories.

On a lighter note, John Clare's 'Sonnet' describes the delights of nature in summer 'Where reed clumps rustle like a wind shook wood': notice that here he is also using alliteration and a simile, so be on the lookout for descriptions that combine more than one figure of speech.

CONTRAST

~~~~~~~~~

Contrast is the juxtaposition of opposites to create a striking effect.

Tatamkhulu Afrika's poem 'Nothing's Changed' deals with the idea that South Africa remained as it was even after black people were accorded the same rights as white people. He shows this by describing an 'up-market, haute cuisine' 'whites only inn' where he presses his nose up against the window to see 'crushed ice white glass,/linen falls,/the single rose' inside. In contrast, the black Africans have to go to a cheap 'working man's cafe' that 'sells/bunny chows..... eat/it at a plastic table's top'. He describes how the workers here instinctively wipe their fingers on their jeans, then 'spit a little on the floor'.

But is the USA very different? Lawrence Ferlinghetti's 'Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes' is set in San Francisco. Stuck in a traffic jam at a red light, he focuses on the juxtaposition of a garbage truck and its two occupants and a Mercedes in which are seated an architect and a 'young blond woman': 'two garbagemen in red plastic blazers..... looking down into/an elegant open Mercedes/with an elegant couple in it'. In the closing stanza Ferlinghetti imagines that anything could have happened in that short space of time that brought these people so close together: 'and the very red light for an instant/holding all four close together/as if anything at all were possible/between them'.

METAPHOR

~~~~~~~~~

A metaphor compares something to something else by saying it IS something else or DOES something else, as in the line from the song 'I've got you under my skin': you cannot literally be under someone else's skin. The English cricketer Fred Truman once famously said 'I don't use metaphors. I don't like to beat about the bush,' which of course is itself a metaphor.

Simon Armitage's poem that begins 'Mother, any distance greater than a single span' recounts how his mother came to help him measure up a house he was moving into, but the entire poem appears to be a metaphor for his changing relationship with his mother as he grows up and becomes independent. She stays downstairs, firmly grasping the 'zero-end' of the spool of tape, while he climbs the stairs with the tape, 'unreeling years between us', seeing his mother as an 'anchor' and himself as a 'kite', gaining his freedom but not breaking the bond.

The poem 'Search for my Tongue' by Sujata Bhatt also uses an extended metaphor (over the course of several lines of the poem) to express the idea that her mother tongue insists on making its presence felt, and seems to grow like a plant: 'the bud opens, ..... it blossoms out of my mouth.'

'Catrin' by Gillian Clarke expresses the desire of both mother and child to establish their separate identities. At the time of birth, the umbilical cord is described by the metaphor 'the tight/red rope of love' that mother and baby are fighting over.

In 'Anne Hathaway' Carol Ann Duffy imagines that Shakespeare's wife felt that the nights she spent with her husband took her to a world of fantasy: 'My lover's words were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses to these lips' skilfully combines both metaphor and simile in one image.

In a far less magical vein, Charles Tichbourne wrote 'Tichbourne's Elegy' in the Tower of London in 1586 before his execution. He was still young at the time, and the poem contains a number of metaphors expressing his regret that he will not be able to live out the course of his life:

'My fruit is fallen, and yet my leaves are green;

...My thread is cut, and yet it is not spun.'

ONOMATOPOEIA

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Although a long word and a difficult one to spell, it can often be something as short as: pop! Onomatopoeia means using a word that actually sounds like the sound it is describing.

Several of Seamus Heaney's poems portray his admiration for his father and grandfather, who both farmed the land. Remembering his grandfather cutting turf in the poem 'Digging', Heaney decribes the sound as 'the squelch and slap of soggy peat'.

Gillian Clarke's 'Baby-sitting' is an honest expression of the lack of a bond between herself and the baby she is looking after. She describes the sounds of the sleeping infant as 'a snuffly/roseate, bubbling sleep;' and we can just imagine the little sounds she is hearing.

In 'We Remember Your Childhood Well', Carol Ann Duffy constructs' a scene where adults are answering what are apparently the accusations of their child, now grown up. 'Call back the sound of their voices. Boom. Boom. Boom.'

OXYMORON

~~~~~~~~~~

Not as common as some other figures or speech, an oxymoron puts two complete opposites together in the same phrase.

Carol Ann Duffy's poem 'Havisham' centres on the elderly Miss Havisham of Charles Dickens's novel 'Great Expectations'. Jilted on her wedding day, she was never able to forgive or forget the gentleman in question. The opening line of Duffy's poem refers to him as her 'Beloved sweetheart bastard'. Towards the end of the poem the oxymoron 'Love's/hate behind a white veil' shows the close link between the two extreme emotions.

PERSONIFICATION

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Personification involves giving things the characteristics of people.

Seamus Heaney's 'Death of a Naturalist' is one of the most descriptive poems in the anthology; he sets the scene at a dam where 'Bubbles gargled delicately' and the flax rotted under 'the punishing sun'.

John Agard's poem 'Half-Caste' written in non-standard English, uses vivid imagery to express his frustration at the attitude people have towards him because of his mixed nationality. He uses personification to describe the persistance of heavy clouds in Britain: 'some o dem cloud..... so spiteful dem dont want de sun pass ah rass'. (Some of those clouds are so spiteful they don't want the sun to pass over us.)

In a celebration of freedom from the routine of daily life, kitchen utensils as well as vegetables are personified in 'This Room' by Imtiaz Dharker: 'Pots and pans... clang/past the crowd of garlic, onions, spices,/fly by the ceiling fan.'

Simon Armitage's poem 'Hitcher' describes the violent reaction of an anti-social driver who picks up a hitch-hiker that seems to have the freedom he fiercely covets. After attacking him and throwing him out of his car, the narrator remembers how the hitcher 'said he liked the breeze/to run its fingers/through his hair.'

SIMILE

~~~~~

A simile is a way of comparing one thing to another using either 'like' or 'as'.

'The flung spray..... spits like a tame cat/Turned savage' describes the ferocity of the wind lashing at the sea in Seamus Heaney's 'Storm on the Island'. The same poet deals with childhood memories in 'Blackberry Picking' where he remembers the taste of the season's first blackberyy: 'its flesh was sweet like thickened wine'.

A more majestic picture of nature is given in Alfred Tennyson's 'The Eagle'; the bird of prey stands on a mountain top and then suddenly 'like a thunderbolt he falls', swooping down on the prey he has been watching. John Clare shows his admiration of nature in summer in his 'Sonnet': 'reed clumps rustle like wind shook wood', where he combines alliteration and assonance with his simile.

'The skin cracks like a pod' describes the effect of drought in an Indian village in the poem 'Blessing' by Imtiaz Dharker, whereupon a pipe bursts and adults and children alike come running to collect the precious water.

'A salwar kameez..... glistening like an orange split open' describes the brilliant colour of the traditional Pakistani clothes sent to her in England in Moniza Alvi's 'Presents from my Aunts in Pakistan'.

'Labourers swarm..... like crows attacking crow-black fields' focuses on the crowds of field-workers in Seamus Heaney's 'At a Potato Digging'. In contrast 'but God, ever nigh,/Appeared like his father in white' to rescue a child whose father had left him behind whilst walking home in the dark in 'The Little boy Found' by William Blake.

In 'Sonnet 130' William Shakespeare uses a simile in the opposite way when he says 'My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;' and yet he values her love above everything.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

The work of these poets is of course published in other collections besides the GCSE Anthology mentioned in my introduction. Faber & Faber Ltd publish the work of Seamus Heaney and that of Simon Armitage, whilst Carol Ann Duffy's poetry is published by Macmillan. Gillian Clarke is published by Carcanet Press Ltd.

Analysing poetry obviously involves more than just discussing figures of speech; style, structure, rhythm, and rhyme are all important. Being able to recognise figures of speech will, however, help in understanding the imagery and meaning of a poem and encourage students perhaps to use figurative language in their own writing.

Night of the Scorpion

Nissim Ezekiel's 'Night of the Scorpion' is the poet's personal account of his memory of his mother being stung by a scorpion when he was a child. He begins by explaining that the scorpion had come in because of heavy rain and had hidden under a sack of rice. Ezekiel uses alliteration to describe the moment of the sting: 'Parting with his poison'. He alludes to evil in the phrase 'diabolic tail', comparing the scorpion to the devil.

The scorpion departed and, on hearing the news of the deadly sting, villagers came to the house. Ezekiel uses the simile 'like swarms of flies' to describe their number and behaviour. He states that they 'buzzed the name of God' repeatedly, the onomatopoeia enabling us to 'hear' the constant noise they made. The scorpion is again seen as the devil in line ten: 'the Evil One'. We can imagine the fear of the child observing the scene, as the peasants' lanterns created 'giant scorpion shadows' on the walls of his home. Onomatopoeia is used again as the poet says that these people 'clicked their tongues' whilst searching for the scorpion. They believed that whenever the scorpion moved, its poison 'moved in Mother's blood'.

Line eighteen is the first in a fourteen-line section which recounts the words of wisdom voiced by the peasants in the hope that the woman would survive. Five of the lines begin 'May ...' and are clear examples of the religious beliefs held by these villagers. They refer to past and future lives, absolution of sins, the lessening of evil and the hope that the poison will 'purify' the woman's flesh and spirit. Ezekiel describes how they surrounded his mother; he saw 'the peace of understanding' in their facial expressions.

Lines thirty-two and thirty-three form a repetitive pattern in which Ezekiel remembers the arrival of 'More candles, more lanterns, more neighbours, / more insects' as the rain continued to fall. In line thirty-four he makes the first direct reference to his mother's suffering, telling us that she 'twisted through and through' and was groaning in pain. He then turns to the reaction of his father, not a religious man but 'sceptic, rationalist'. On this occasion, however, the man resorted to 'every curse and blessing' accompanied by various herbal concoctions, such was his desperation. Ezekiel describes in detail that his father actually set alight to the toe that had been bitten. It must have had a profound effect on the poet as a child; he describes how 'I watched the flame feeding on my mother', personifying the fire. Ezekiel then watched and listened to a 'holy man' carrying out certain rites to 'tame' the poison. The poison lost its sting the following night.

The first forty-five lines form one continuous stanza relating the event from start to finish. The poem concludes with a short three-line stanza in which Ezekiel recalls his mother's reaction to her frightening and painful experience. She spoke of it only briefly, thanking God and saying how glad she was that the scorpion had chosen to sting her rather than her children. This was the boundless, selfless love of a mother, and these were words which Ezekiel never forgot.

One of the interesting points about the poem is that Ezekiel narrates it from the point of view of a child who was purely an observer, not involved as the adults were in taking any action. This allows him to relate the actions and words of the peasants and his father whilst being detached from them. It is an insight into the behaviour of a small community in India where everyone becomes involved in one family or one mother's suffering, and all gather to witness the event and contribute a prayer. To the child it must have seemed as though there was a huge number of people, and the night must have been interminable. His comparison of the peasants to flies suggests that he would rather they had left the family in peace.

The structure of the poem is very free, with lines of varying lengths and no rhyme scheme. The second stanza that ends the poem attracts attention for its brevity and emphasises the words of the mother and their effect on the son.