Analysis of Heaney's works

In conclusion, I commend Seamus Heaney on two poems that really do require serious thought to fully picture, and even if what you picture was not intended, it still furthers your consciousness anyway so carry on. The frogs appear, Heaney uses the word ‘invaded,’ and in this line he also uses caesura to cause you to pay attention to it. The question is, what’s changed? This is where they differ, the fear in the lines “I knew/That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it,” has most definitely stopped Heaney from ever furthering his career as a naturalist, although giving himself the title in the first place was rather childishly extreme. He even gave the flies a good image with the lines “…bluebottles/Wove a strong gauze of sound,” I particularly enjoy this phrase as the buzzing of bluebottles conjures the image of a gauze in your mind. ’ When this is coupled with Heaney’s personification of it with the words “Daily it sweltered,” you start to feel sad for the putrid flax, and you cannot imagine how Heaney ever could have enjoyed nature with a beginning like this. This fear also came from the fact that all that he knew had changed, he talks about a coarse croaking that he “had not heard/Before. Both poems are wrought with this, and I think Heaney likes it because firstly it applies the dirty, grimy lifestyle of an exploring child, and secondly because he can assault a lot of the reader’s senses with it. ”Death of a Naturalist” however, is written in blank verse, probably because rhyming words make a poem sound lighter, and Heaney needed sharp, shocking imagery in order to express his feelings at that time. Mould is too round a word, the ‘f’ sound of ‘fungus’ is harder and even more unpleasant to the reader. I’m not sure if Heaney really did plan it to be seen like this, but if he did, then that is quite impressive. In “Death of a Naturalist” we know that the guilt is there from Heaney’s reaction to the frogs being there, if he felt that he had done nothing wrong, then he would not need to feel afraid. When he wants to make a word stand out, he will write a line of monosyllabic words, then make the special word have more than one syllable, so it lingers as you say it. Heaney also never speaks of the tadpoles growing in frogs, suggesting that at some stage they died. ” These intricate features are important to Heaney as they are from his personal experiences, and he wishes to convey them to the reader in such a way that they themselves can almost relive them as they read.