Death of a Naturalist

'Death of a Naturalist'

• It is about the joy of nature and finding frogspawn when you are young 
• 'Death' emphasises how you don't have the same curiosity when you get older and you don't see adventure you see disgusting frogs

• He had a rural ubpringing in Ireland
• It suggests he is reliving old childhood memories
• His brother died when he was 12

'Here, every spring/ I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied'

• It is narrated by Heaney as a child in the first stanza as he uses childish vocabulary
• Every spring also suggests routine and something he looked forward too as it brought him joy as he didn't find it disgusting.

'I sickened, turned and ran'

• The power of three represents his realisation of how disgusting they were and the death of his childhood curiosity

'But best of all was the warm thick slobber' - The superlative shows a childs point of view and makes the end of this phase of life sadder 

'With cowdung in the grass and angry frogs' - Personification represents how the frogspawn has changed to frogs in the same way the narrator has grown up and become disgusted rather than excited by nature

'their loose necks pulsed like snails' - The simile creates an image in the reader's mind and takes them away from the sharing the childhood joy with the narrator to remembering the reality of nature

Sun, butterflies, nimble, yellow - Positive nature semantic field doesn't continue into the second stanza showing he only saw the good parts when he was a child

'brown, angry, obscene, slime - Negative semantic field does go intot the second stanza showing that he has always seen the messy parts of nature but his feelings towards it has changed

• Separated into the childish nature loving boys point of view and the adult's point of view on nature
• Line 21 'In rain' is very short and emphasises the change between the young and the older narrator.
• Stanza two makes reference to it being wet 'slap and plop' suggesting that the rain represents the end of the excited child's adventure