Another week, another top Irish poem. This week, it is another Seamus Heaney poem. It comes in at number 60 in the top 100 Irish poems list. In fact, Seamus Heaney’s poems feature in 10 out of the top 100 poems. After all, he did win the Nobel Prize for Literature (in 1995). It also features in my top Seamus Heaney poems article, and you can watch Heaney himself reading the poem below:
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So what is the poem Death of a Naturalist all about?
Good question; it is another poem where Heaney is looking back on his life. In this case, it is the death of his childhood. Or moving on and the loss of childhood innocence.
I also found a short clip of him reading his poem on YouTube. You can watch it below, and I have linked to the full poem in my notes. I enjoyed the video of how he reads the poem word for word without looking at the book once.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
This is the title poem of Seamus Heaney’s first collection, Death of a Naturalist, published by Faber in 1966. It takes us back to a flax-dam near the family farm at Mossbawn in County Derry, where flax was left to rot in water before it was made into linen.
The first half is pure childhood delight. Each spring the boy collects frogspawn and watches it turn into tadpoles, while his teacher offers a sweet, tidy version of how frogs live. Heaney makes the rotting dam sound rich and alive, full of heat, noise and smell.
Then everything turns. The grown frogs arrive in force, and the place that fascinated him suddenly seems ugly and threatening. The boy flees, convinced that nature means to punish him for the spawn he took. The naturalist who dies is the innocent child. In his place is someone who knows nature is not a picture in a school book, and who has had a first taste of fear and of the grown-up world.
Read the full poem: Death of a Naturalist by Seamus Heaney at the Poetry Foundation. You will also find it in Death of a Naturalist (Faber).