English Lit - Death of a Naturalist

Death of a Naturalist

Topic

• It focuses on his experience of collecting and watching frogspawn as a child, and his reaction when the spawn turned into frogs.
• In the first ten lines of the poem Heaney uses vivid imagery to describe the setting and its sights, smell and sounds.
• Lines fifteen to twenty-one are a very childlike account of how the schoolteacher, Miss Walls, taught Heaney's class about frogs and frog spawn.
• In the second stanza, the ideas of the child in the poem change, he loses his interest in nature and now sees it as unappealing.

Language:

• Both Stanza's begin ominously, dramatic language increases fear and anticipation of event.

• Semantic fields: War and Weapons – childlike imagination and fear

• Child like…