Death of a Naturalist
by Seamus Heaney
Summary
Death of a Naturalist is Seamus Heaney's first collection, thirty four poems published when he was twenty seven, and it stays close to the County Derry farm he grew up on: turf cutting, a forge, a father working a spade, a boy watching adults do physical work he both admires and cannot yet do himself. The opening poem, Digging, sets the whole book's argument in its final lines, where the poet decides his pen will be his own spade, a tool for a different kind of labor than his father's or grandfather's but one he claims deserves the same seriousness.
The title poem follows a boy who collects frogspawn every spring with real delight until the summer he returns to find the pond crowded with adult frogs, their croaking suddenly menacing rather than familiar, and Heaney lets that shift from wonder to fear stand for how quickly a child's confident understanding of the natural world can curdle. Mid Term Break, one of the collection's most quoted poems, remembers being called home from boarding school for the funeral of his four year old brother, killed by a car, and ends on a line of plain arithmetic, a four foot box, a foot for every year, that carries more weight for refusing to say anything else.
The poems are physical and exact rather than showy, built from the vocabulary of farm work, and Heaney trusts concrete nouns to do the emotional work most young poets reach for adjectives to do instead. It suits a reader who wants poetry to start from a specific childhood rather than a general one, and it rewards anyone willing to read slowly enough to notice how carefully each poem is built.
Historical Context & Significance
The Swedish Academy gave Seamus Heaney the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth which exalt everyday miracles and the living past. Death of a Naturalist, published by Faber and Faber in 1966, predates that citation by nearly thirty years and is the book that first established the rural, physical voice the Academy was recognizing: John Unterecker, reviewing it for The New York Times Book Review, found some of the poems heavy handed in their wit but praised the collection's skillful use of metaphor and its attention to rural imagery. It went on to win the Cholmondeley Award, the Eric Gregory Award, the Somerset Maugham Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize.
Heaney learned of the Nobel while on holiday in Greece and stayed unreachable for two days before reporters found him; a journalist in Dublin reportedly chartered a helicopter to track him down for an interview. Asked about joining an Irish Nobel lineage that already included William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw and Samuel Beckett, Heaney called himself, self deprecatingly, a little foothill at the bottom of a mountain range, and privately referred to the award among friends as the N thing.