Discuss the poems Death of a Naturalist and Personal Helicon by

In Seamus Heaney’s poetry, there is a recurring theme of his talking of the past, and more predominantly about significant moments in time, where he came to realisations that brought him to adulthood. In “Death of a Naturalist” Heaney describes a moment in his childhood where he learnt that nature was not as beautiful as seem to be when he was just a naive child. Heaney does this on a deeper level in “Midterm Break” describes his experience of his younger brothers funeral and the mixed, confusing feelings he encountered, consequently learning that he no longer was a child, and had no choice but to be exposed to reality. Robert Frost in one sense also describes particular moments in time, where his narrator comes to realisations. However,

you hard. By referring to the sound to a ‘gauze’ it is as if we can’t

Seamus Heaney uses complex and deep language throughout his writing. He tells of the optimism and hunger of being a youth through the masted use of imagery, diction, and symbolism. Heaney uses images to show the life of the speaker as a youth. As the poem progress it shows how people grow up and lose their adolescent behavior. Using non parallel structure produces the imbalanced feeling of how the optimism of being young is more important than the greediness. As people grow up they learn that the world may not be peaches and cream like their younger self

I have been asked before you today to discuss my opinion on the poetry of Seamus Heaney, and although this style of learning wouldn’t be what you’d be used to, I’m hoping you will all benefit from what I have to say and leave here with a clear understanding of Heaney’s brilliance, questioning the meaning behind what he has written.

Seamus Heaney was born in Northern Ireland, 1939 and spent a large portion of his life in Dublin (“Seamus Heaney”). Internationally critically acclaimed as one of the most influential poets of the 20th century his works serve to aspire a rediscovery of natural beauty. The beginning of Heaney’s career took off in Ireland where he was first recognized for his poetry collections Death of a Naturalist and Door into the Dark (“Seamus Heaney”). Even though Heaney’s literature if very influenced by his life in Ireland and contains great depth, the general themes remain painless and relatable. Heaney reflects simplicity through his short phrases, straightforward but philosophical diction and syntax, and reference to place, to reveal his perspective on the underappreciated beauty of the most basic ideas.

* 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

may look nice and the visual rewards may be great, but that it takes a

Seamus Heaney once said: “The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.” Heaney is known and praised for his works and love of poetry, which was shaped by his family and experiences. Heaney’s poems reveal his close relationship with nature, but they’re also unique in the sense that he manages to convey a universal message while focusing on an individual idea. Shaped by his quaint life on his childhood farm, family, famous poets, education, and the numerous teaching jobs he had over the years, Seamus Heaney used this influence to create poetry that balances a sense of natural speech with his commitment to what he described as

Words like slap, pop, slobber, farting, and croaked illustrates the realism of how the flax-dam is. The use of using onomatopoeia is to describe the nature and the surroundings, and to show the uncertainty that is going through the boy’s mind in the second stanza. Sibilant sounds are also used in the poem. Words like slap, slime, sods, and spawn show the uncertainty and the tension that the boy is under. Heaney also uses stop sounds to show his frightful and uncertain mood (Bluebottles, Poised, Grenades, Mud, Farting, Blunt, Kings, Vengeance etc). This stops the reader from flowing which gives a sense of uncertainty.

Death of a naturalist is about Seamus Heaney as a child going to this pond where every year he went to collect frogspawn. The poem is split up into two sections called stanzas. He starts of the poem with some negative imagery to describe the place where he goes. The second part of the first stanza he tell us about how he use to fill jam pots with the frogspawn

The title of the poem “Death of a Naturalist” is very suggestive itself; the death of someone who loved nature. However, it is about an individual whose emotions fluctuates towards nature as they grow up. In the first stanza of the poem Heaney uses a range of literary devices such as imagery, “green and heavy headed” and “warm thick slobber” which gives the reader a concrete representation of an impression, a feeling, or an idea that Heaney is trying to portray; which is the freedom and carefree attitude that children have as they do not worry what others think of them and they only care about having ‘fun’. Heaney also tries to show the curiosity and the early education “Miss Walls would tell us how the daddy frog was called a bullfrog”.

The poet Seamus Heaney has created many masterful works including “Follower”, “From the Frontier of Writing”, and “Personal Helicon”. In each of these poems Heaney uses contrasting ideas to expand the reader’s understanding of the poem and its deeper meaning. He does this through the contrast of one character to another to show growth, the contrast of setting to convey a feeling, or even how a person fits into society. Heaney uses different kinds of contrasts in each poem to achieve different feats. One example is the poem “Follower” where Heaney compares a boy to his father.

and it is evident that he does not like the killing as he uses words

O’Connor’s vivid topics of life and death are fuelled by his observation of nature. This is reflected in a whole range of his oeuvre, particularly in ‘Turtles Hatching’ and ‘The Sun-Hunters’, as they provide specific animalistic details to the diverse struggle of life that flora and fauna endure. Through the creative employment of figurative language and literal techniques, such as metaphors and the extensive use of verbs, O’Connor is able to address the complexity of life and death in means of teaching us to value our life.

Imagery is the use of language to create “mental pictures” in one’s mind through descriptions and “sensory perceptions” (Wheeler). In“Digging,” Heaney establishes the setting of the poem by describing that he is in what seems to be a room with a window that overlooks an area of green. He starts the poem off with “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests; snug as a gun. / Under my window, a clean rasping sound / When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: / My father, digging. I look down” (“Digging”). He uses the appeals to sound, as in “a clean rasping sound” and “the spade sinks into gravelly ground,” as well as appeals to sight, “I look down,” and appeals to touch, “[b]etween my finger and my thumb,” to create an image in the reader’s mind of what that day, or perhaps thought, looked like. The image that is created is one that shows contrast, in this case between an unidentified narrator and his father. As the poem continues, Heaney describes “But I’ve no spade to follow men like them. / Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.” The contrast that this furthers is the idea that the narrator is very different from his father, creating a divide that can be the start of tension. Because the narrator and his father cannot necessarily understand each other due to these differences, as each chooses his different approach to digging, the narrator seems to understand that not much can be done about the father’s choice to remain a