Explore how Heaney writes about childhood experiences in Death of a Naturalist and in one other poem of your choice. In your Response you should include discussion of the following:

Similar to the Death of a Naturalist, Blackberry picking begins with the description of the season. This sets the scene so the poet can begin to describe the picking of blackberries from the apperance of the first fruit to the frenzy of activity as more fruit ripens. The second section concerns the attempt to preserve the berries which is always a failure, as the fungus set in and the fruit fermented.

The poem is ambiguous in its viewpoint. We see the view of a frustrated child in “I...felt like crying” and “It wasn't fair”, but a more detached adult view in the antithesis of “Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.” The poem looks at a theme that is as old as poetry itself - the transitory of pleasure (how good things do not last), and relates it to a familiar childhood experience.

The language used in death of a naturalist is simple and precise convyeing the perception of a child. This big description of a small event is written is a stream of conciousness, emulating how the child thinks.The vividness of his description is achieved through Heaney’s use of images loaded with words that lengthen the vowels and have a certain weightiness in their consonants, ‘green and heavy-headed Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.’
The sound of the insects which, “Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell” is conveyed by the ‘s’ and ‘z’ sounds but also, importantly, acts like a bandage preventing the spread of decay. The images of decay, “festered”, “rotted”, “sweltered” and “the punishing sun” do not seem to trouble the boy in this first section, he takes a delight in the sensuousness of the natural world. The onomatopoeic “slobber” effectively conveys the boy’s relish for the tangible world around him. We can further see how he views this world by the words “clotted” and “jellied”; to the boy the frogspawn is like cream and jam, something to be touched and enjoyed.

Blackberry Picking presents the tasting of the blackberries as a sensual pleasure –

referring to sweet “flesh”, to “summer's blood” and to “lust”. He uses many adjectives of colour and suggests the enthusiasm of the collectors, using every available container to hold the fruit they have picked. There is also a hint that this picking is somehow violent - after the “blood” comes the claim that the collectors' hands were “sticky as Bluebeard's” The lusciousness of the fresh fruit contrasts with what it quickly becomes “fur” and “rat-grey fungus”, as “lovely canfuls” smell “of rot”. The poem is set out in iambic pentameter couplets with half rhyme. Like many of Heaney's poems it is full of monosyllabic nouns: “clot”, “knot”, “cans”, “pots”, “blobs”, “pricks”, “byre”, “fur”, “cache”, “bush”, “flesh” and “rot’.

In section two everything changes. This change is marked by differences in tone, diction, imagery, movement and sound.

The sounds are no longer delicate, but are “coarse”, “bass” and “farting”. “The slap and plop were obscene threats.” The onomatopoeic “slap” and “plop” slow down the pace here and the full stop gives emphasis to the feeling of threat. The "warm thick slobber/Of frogspawn" has become "The great slime kings" and the transformation is further suggested by the threatening image of the frog as "mud grenades".