Department of English

Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University

"Death of a Naturalist"

(1966)

Seamus Heaney

(April 13, 1939 – August 30, 2013)

Notes

1  flax-dam:

Flax dam at Cloney Farm, Knocknacarry, c. 1914, Welch Collection, Ulster Museum

Brian Willis, "The Flax Dam," Your Place and Mine, BBC (2014) The tradition of the flax dam goes back well into the early 1700's, but has now vanished completely. [...] The scene I've painted shows a group of people, possibly three generations of the same family, preparing to put the recently pulled bundles ("Beets") of flax into this pool of still water where they stayed for three weeks or so. This was done to soften the stems, which made it easier to separate the outer skin from the woody inside. The process is called "retting." [...] A neighbour, who visited me to see the artwork in progress, said her Uncle used to do this job and the smell was horrendous. Before he was allowed indoors he had to remove his clothes and leave them in the outhouse. Michael Parker, "Pioneer, 1966–69," Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet (Iowa: U of Iowa P, 1993) In Irish Folkways, E. Estyn Evans vividly describes the harvesting of flax: When grown for fibre, flax is harvested after the pale blue flowers have fallen, but before the seed ripens, and because it is the stalk that is being harvested it is not cut, but pulled up by the roots.... The beets (sheaves) are carried as soon as possible to be steeped (drowned or dubbed) in the flax dam or 'lint hole' where soft peaty water has been standing for some days to warm up...The process of retting (rotting) takes from seven to twelve days and is soon advertised by a foul and penetrating odour as the core or 'bone' of the stalk decays. Close to Heaney's first home just such a dam was located, and his maternal grandfather was employed as a boiler man in a nearby linen works. (65)

Once you started teaching, did you live in Belfast all the year round?

I stayed in Belfast during term time and would go home to Bellaghy at Christmas and sometimes at weekends and always for the summer holidays. 'Digging' I wrote at home in The Wood in August 1964, upstairs in the bedroom. 'Death of a Naturalist' I wrote in one of the flats on a Sunday afternoon, after lying out in the sun with Marie and her flatmates at the back of the place they had in Tate's Avenue. The dead heat in their little back garden and the reek of litter bins in the alley behind the houses reminded me of the stink of flax in the dam years before. (68)

So those poems you've just mentioned—'Blackberry Picking' and so on—belong to early 1965: a period when, according to your own account, you 'wrote a hell of a lot'. Was this writing an act of will, to ensure you'd have enough poems for the first collection, or were you writing with an extra surge of confidence because Faber and Faber was beckoning?

I was buoyed up and charged up and at the same time had a powerful will to deliver. Charles Monteith's letter picked out 'Death of a Naturalist' and 'Digging' as the poems that took his fancy, so that encouraged me to concentrate on subjects and settings around Mossbawn. And once I opened those channels, I got the surge, definitely. (82)

[...] there are those 'mud-grenades' in 'Death of a Naturalist' that seem to have a sexual pin in them just waiting to be pulled, so who's to say for definite about these things? (83)

You've mentioned your admiration for the oracular, prophetic quality in Yeats; yet you have also said that, in Field Work, you wanted the note of the poetry to sound more like your 'social self'.

I should have said 'include my current circumstances' rather than 'sound like my social self'. At the time I was glad that something of the actual life I was living in Glanmore was getting into the poems, that the silage smell came from the farm next door and not from the flax dam in Broagh. At this distance, however, 'Death of a Naturalist' or 'The Tollund Man' or 'The Grauballe Man' seem to have as 'social' a voice as anything in Field Work. (195)

—Dennis O'Driscoll, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (London: Faber and Faber, 2009)

Vocabulary

diction

connotation

association

cadence
assonance
imagery

visual imagery

olfactory imagery

movement
shift

metaphor

Sample Student Responses to Seamus Heaney's "Death of a Naturalist"

Response 1: 

Reference

Reference

Heaney, Seamus. “Death of a Naturalist.” Selected Poems 1966–1987. New York: Noonday Press, 1995. 5–6. Print.

O'Driscoll, Dennis. Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney. London: Faber and Faber, 2009. Print.

Further Reading

Heaney, Seamus. Selected Poems 1966–1987. New York: Noonday Press, 1995. Print.

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Last updated March 11, 2016