Compare and Contrast 'Death of a Naturalist', ' An Advancement of Learning' and ' The Early Purges'

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Compare and Contrast of ‘Death of a Naturalist’, ‘An Advancement of Learning’ and ‘The Early Purges’
By Alex Lynne

In this essay I am going to discuss ‘Death of a Naturalist’, ‘An Advancement of Learning’ and ‘The Early Purges’ by Seamus Heaney. I will focus on the similarities and differences between these poems in terms of what they are about, their language and themes.

        The first out of the three poems by Heaney that I have studied is ‘Death of a Naturalist’. This poem is about Heaney as a young child, exploring a field. He comes across frogspawn and remembers when his teacher would tell him about how the “Daddy frog was called a bull frog”, “and how the mammy frog laid hundreds of little eggs and this was frogspawn”. Heaney then writes about when he used to steal the frog spawn and put it into a jam jar for school, and how he would watch them grow into tadpoles. When he finishes describing what he did, Heaney starts a new stanza. The mood changes in stanza in this stanza. Heaney describes the frogs as angry, and that they were croaking in a way he had never heard; “The air was thick with a bass chorus.” Heaney claims in the poem, that the frogs were angry at him for stealing the frogspawn when he was younger. Heaney “sickened, turned and ran.” The second poem entitled “An Advancement of Learning”. This poem is about Heaney taking a walk along an embankment and coming across a rat that was crawling out of the river. Heaney writes “I turned down the path in cold sweat”. However he comes across another rat. Heaney claims that the rat was staring at him, “insidiously listening”. He describes the rat having “raindrop” eyes. Heaney stares back at the rat – “forgetting how he used to panic” when he lived on a farm. The rat “retreated” back up a sewage pipe. Heaney then says” Then I walked on and crossed the bridge”. The third and final poem I will write about is “The Early Purges”. This poem is about Heaney when he lived on his farm. He talks about when he was six years of age and sees kittens being drowned in a bucket by a man called Dan Taggart. He writes how they were drowned by water being pumped down there small lungs and then being thrown on a dung hill, where they were left to rot in summer heat. Heaney is shocked by this. He forgot about his fear of the animals being killed until Dan trapped “big rats, snared rabbits, shot crows or, with a sickening tug, pulled old hens’ necks. He soon changes his attitude towards the killing of the animals. Heaney sees that the killing of the animals is a natural process and makes scene. He states; “And now, when shrill pups are prodded to drown, I just shrug, ‘bloody pups’.” He sees the animals killed as pests as that is how he was brought up to think. All the poems have some relation to an animal and a fear and take place when Heaney was a child. For example of an animal and fear in ‘Death of a Naturalist’ the animal is a frog and the fear is that the frogs will attack, in ‘An Advancement of Learning’ the animal is a rat and the fear is of the rat and finally in ‘The Early Purges’ the animals are kittens and the fear is of the kittens being drowned. Some differences are war words used in ‘Death of a Naturalist’ and ‘An Advancement of Learning’ and not in ‘The Early Purges.

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        In this paragraph I am going to discuss the characters and themes and how each experience of each character is experienced. The characters of ‘Death of a Naturalist’ are Heaney him self and the frogs. The theme for this poem is war; Heaney sees the frogs starting a war with him. In the poem Heaney gets a shock, and finds the whole situation very scary. He ‘sickens and turns’. In ‘An Advancement of Learning’, the characters are Heaney as a child again. Also the theme is overcoming a fear. Heaney experiences the situation in the poem as yet again scary. ...

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