Death of a Naturalist: Extra thoughts. It is a sign of a demanding and enriching poem that we find more and more with each visit.
If the poem is autobiographical and is thus an act of recollection, what thoughts and emotions seem to dominate the act of remembrance? ( Disgust, repulsion, fascination, compulsion, attraction, freedom, enthusiasm, fanatical commitment of childhood, absorption, realisation, epiphany, revelation)
The Catholic upbringing of the young poet makes shame around sexuality highly likely. Reading the poem again, I was struck by the shift from the affection surrounding the frogspawn to utter revulsion and fear. You don’t need to be a psychologist to see why its shift might occur once the truth about reproduction is known. The poem is not finally about the revulsion the poet feels towards the highly fertile natural world of the flax-dam, it is towards himself. He is horrified about his own creation and his future as a sexually active human being who can create others. The Catholic blight of ‘mortal sin’ haunts the poem.
The immersive quality of the poem is created through its consistent use of sensory description which evokes an overweight sense of the flax-dam’s hypnotic presence. This description is even wrought through synaesthesia which reveals the intensity of the young poet’s immersion in this landscape and time of his youthful life.
Are we beset by an overriding experience of nostalgia or mounting horror? Look at the temporal markers that announce both parts of the poem. ‘ All year’ reminds us of the ritualistic nature of being an avid naturalist. The poet clearly found his youthful calendar governed and regulated by his fascination with the ‘flax-dam.‘ No wonder then, that it is so intensely recollected.
The sensory overload and sense of hyperbole employed by the poet to resurrect his past love of the landscape, communicates the ripeness of the place and its stand out significance in his early life. The poet’s choice of verbs( fostered, rotted, sweltered etc) and deployment of alliteration and sonic sounds, grant dynamic sentience to the whole world of the flax-dam.
This landscape is intensely animated as it is so much alive to the poet, even as an adult writer. .
Significantly, this rampant, fertile life is accepted without any sophisticated explanation of sexual behaviours that govern it. ‘Miss Walls’ operates as a guiding, nurturing figure protecting childhood innocence and keeping the reality of the flax dam at a distance. The childlike references to ‘jampots’ and the ‘mammy frog’ anchor the remembrances to a primary school stage.
Yet the ‘townland’ is also presumably governed by knowledge initially shrouded from childhood view. This inescapable proximity of the revelation of sexuality and human reproduction contributes perhaps to the almost hysterical sense of horror at the end of the poem.
When the temporal marker turns to the looming horror of ‘ Then one hot day.‘ We encounter the older poet’s unavoidable revision of his experiences of the natural world. It is as if his perception has arrived at a moment of revelation. This recognition is challenging as it is converted into disgust. Disgust is presumably temporary but the poet is not interested in diluting the child’s horror as the poem is an intense exploration of this rite of passage moment. For, in reality, the flax-dam still remains its overripe self, only now the poet realises how the frogs have been created, so it is his perception of nature that has changed.
Procreation also appears as an act of betrayal and therefore engenders disgust because the poet realises that he has been duped by trusted adult figures like his teacher, and he displaces his betrayal onto the frogs who are rendered his enemies so that nature now seems bent on revenge for his naivety and ‘ naturalist’ tampering.
However, perhaps the poem can best be understood as the representation of the horror of any child when our maturing self realises how little control we actually have over our own lives? This sudden epiphany about the loss of control is reflected in the grotesque, near-hysterical horror at the conclusion of the poem. Guilt seems mixed with terror, emerging as disgust. Disgust is the other side of fascination.
The poem is very challenging to paraphrase as any translation of Heaney’s recollection risks diluting the language’s originality and musical power. Heaney allows the reader to encounter his past as a youthful naturalist through his brilliance as a mature poet, whose keen linguistic skills allow the act of recreation to mimic his childhood curiosity. The death of a naturalist is truly the birth of the poet.
