COMPARE HOW SEAMUS HEANEY PUTS ACROSS THE GROWING UP EXPERIENCE IN “DEATH OF A NATURALIST” WITH HOW GROWING UP IS DESCRIBED IN ANOTHER 3 POEMS. YOU SHOULD CHOOSE AT LEAST ONE POEM BY GILLIAN CLARKE AND ONE FROM THE PRE-1914 COLLECTION IN YOUR ANSWER.
Besides “Death of a Naturalist”, the poems I have chosen to write about are “Blackberry Picking” (also by Seamus Heaney), “Catrin” (by Gillian Clarke) and “The Song of the Old Mother” (from the pre-1914 collection). The main focus of the two Heaney poems is the growing up experience but it is also touched on in the other two poems.
The most obvious comparisons lie in the two Heaney poems, which look at Heaney’s own experiences as a boy growing up in rural Ireland. Both “Blackberry Picking” and “Death of a Naturalist” seem to be set at a time when Heaney was very young (seven or eight years old, or even younger) and both use Nature as a tool in his learning/growing up experience. Both poems are structured, so that the first, rather longer section describes a period of innocent enjoyment and the second section communicates harsh experience and the consequent growing up effect on the young boy.
In “Catrin” and “The Song …” the speaker is not the child but the mother, which perhaps creates something of a distance between us and the child’s perspective. Catrin seems to be a bit older than the child Heaney judging from the way she is more defiant, wanting to explore and experience the world (she wants to stay out and skate in the dark). The Old Mother’s children seem to be older teenagers too, judging from their interests and concerns.
Both “Catrin” and “The Song …” deal with growing up children and how their demands/expectations affect the parent. Catrin’s desire for independence worries her mother and brings out her natural desire to protect her child:
“ … bringing up
From the heart’s pool that old rope”
Catrin’s own desire to grow up and not be held in by her mother is communicated very vividly in the description we are given of her. Her “rosy/Defiant glare” along with the adjectives “straight, strong, long” and the way she “stand(s) there” all convey the strong emotions of a girl, who feels the need to assert her will and break away from what she sees as her mother’s over-protectiveness, something that all children feel as they begin to grow up.
The Old Mother’s girls are rather typically selfish and self absorbed teenagers (according to the Old Mother). As youngsters, they have no sense of responsibility (it seems that they don’t offer to help their mother with her chores); they are vain, thinking only of their looks:
“the matching of ribbons for bosom and head”
And they are lazy:
“the young lie long and dream in their bed”
Unlike Catrin, they are not openly in conflict or picking a fight with their mother, but their behaviour arouses her resentment and what sounds like jealousy:
“And I must work because I am old”
In both his poems, Heaney puts across the growing up experience as a bitter and harsh one. Early childhood is happy because of the innocent pleasure a child takes in the world around him. In “Death of a Naturalist” he loved his frog spawning in the flax dam (which to most adults would be an ugly and repugnant (disgusting) place, but to a child is a magical mixture of sounds, sights, smells and things to feel) and listening happily to the euphemistic (makes it sound nicer than it really is) descriptions of frog life and reproduction from his primary teacher. In “Blackberry-Picking” he would cheerfully trek round the countryside, disregarding setbacks like “briars scratched” and filling every available utensil with blackberries.
In both poems, experience (and hence growing up) hits you suddenly and sours you. “Glossy purple clots” are revealed as “rat grey fungus”; the comfortable sounding “daddy” and “mammy frogs” become “gross-bellied” “slime kings”. Heaney uses some very vivid and colloquial language to convey the horror of learning about life: “blunt heads farting” conveys ugly sounds emanating (coming out of) from ugly creatures while “slap” and “plop” are onomatopoeic and help us to hear the disgusting sounds that the frogs make, which in turn enable us to appreciate the young boy’s horror and fear. At the end of “Death of a Naturalist” Heaney tells us he was “sickened”; at the end of “Blackberry-Picking” he tells us “I always felt like crying”. Growing up then is painful and shocking. Cynicism sets in with the very last line of “Death of a Naturalist” where he declares:
“Each year I hoped they would keep, knew they would not.”
You realise he is not the same carefree, optimistic little boy who would trek for hours in pursuit of happiness.
Although “Death of a Naturalist” and “Blackberry Picking” are structured similarly (first section is about Innocence and the second is about Experience), you get “clues” at the end of the first section of “Blackberry-Picking” about the “change” to come. This is through Heaney’s use of imagery at lines 14-16. He talks of how the blackberries “burned/ Like a plate of eyes” from the top of his bucket. This is an ugly image. It suggests how round and shiny the berries are but it also suggests his guilty feelings at being so greedy; he imagines the berries are looking at him (“plate of eyes”). There is a further suggestion of guilt in comparing himself to Bluebeard, the notorious murderer. So in a way, we see the lesson of stanza 2 coming in a way that we don’t so much in “Death of a Naturalist”.