Death of A Naturalist Lyrics
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 dragon-flies, spotted butterflies,
But best of all was the warm thick slobber
Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water
In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring,
I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied
Specks to range on window-sills at home,
On shelves at school, and wait and watch until
The fattening dots burst into nimble-
Swimming tadpoles. 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. You could tell the weather by frogs too,
For they were yellow in the sun and brown
In rain.
Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.
About
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” refers not to an actual scientific expert, but simply an inquisitive child.
The death referred to is metaphorical; the loss of innocent enthusiasm in response to half-understood realities. The idea of collecting and observing natural things including frogspawn is almost universal in childhood. The poem conveys the fact that harsh realities, including sexuality, must invade a child’s consciousness.
The young speaker is ultimately terrified that the ‘angry frogs’ will seek vengeance for his having stolen their spawn, and that he deserved it. So, the child’s relationship with nature isn’t simply fascinated wonder, but involves fear. The metamorphosis of the tadpoles into frogs is a metaphor for the change in the child’s perceptions and the awakening of sexual awareness.
The learning process is accompanied by loss and revulsion, and the sense that childhood innocence is undermined too soon by adult knowledge. This was a perception that William Wordsworth, the early nineteenth Century Romantic poet explores in ‘The Prelude’.
Fair seed time had my sould and I grew up
Fostererd alike by beauty and by fear.
Structure
The poem is divided into two stanzas of 21 and 12 lines respectively. The break or volta, where the child loses innocence and becomes aware that life is not so simple, comes at the beginning of line 22, with ‘Then’.
There is no regular rhyme scheme or metre, but instead Heaney uses enjambment, varied sentence length and varying pace to convey the nuances of the story. He also uses internal rhyme , as in lines three and four stanza two where ‘bass’ and ‘gross’ are consonantly rhymed. These devices give the poem unity and cohesion.
Language and Imagery
The overriding theme is of the child’s transition to awareness of the unpleasant realities of life, including sexuality, aggression and revenge.
Heaney’s style is strong and muscular. He doesn’t flinch from unpleasant realities, as exemplified in the use of words like ‘slobber’ and ‘fester’. The effect is powerful rather than lyrical. In this poem he adopts the voice of the adult looking back, the voice of a child, and the child’s imitation of his teacher’s expressions, as in ‘daddy frog’ and ‘mammy frog’. What is specially significant is what isn’t said … the reproductive sexual process that creates the next generation of frogs.
Q&A
Find answers to frequently asked questions about the song and explore its deeper meaning