In ‘The Early Purges’, the poem begins with a one-line sentence, a blunt factual statement summarising the incident. Heaney uses monosyllabic words such as ‘drown’, ‘trapped’, ‘snared’, ‘shot’ or ‘tug’ to describe the various ways in which animals are killed on the farm. These words show that country life could be brutal because it was not necessarily enjoyable to kill these animals, but it was something that had to be done. The images that Heaney uses here, such as ‘with a sickening tug, pulled old hens’ necks.’ are not pleasant but are extremely effective in describing the culling of animals on the farm.
In ‘Death of a Naturalist’, Heaney organises his poem in two sections, corresponding to the change in the boy. This change shows the inevitability of the progression from innocence to experience and the transformation from the unquestioning child to the reflective adult. The change from innocence to experience in this poem is marked by differences in tone, diction, imagery, movement, and sound. A large gap clearly divides the two sections of innocence and experience.
In ‘The Early Purges’, the change from innocence to experience is marked by the initial word of a new stanza, ‘still.’ Heaney now reflects on his squeamish feelings in his childhood as ‘false sentiments’, and feels that his childhood reactions were mistakes. Furthermore when incidents similar to his traumatic experience of his childhood recur in later life, e.g. when pups are ‘prodded’
With the same lack of feeling with which kittens earlier were ‘pitched, slung, and sluiced,’ his reaction is to ‘shrug’ and to speak of the animals in the same dismissive tone as Dan, ‘ bloody pups.’
‘Death of a Naturalist’ recreates and examines the moment of the child's confrontation with the fact that life is not what it seems. The experience transforms the boy's perception of the world. No longer is it a place for unquestioning sensuous delight. It is a dynamic world of uncertainty. The success of the poem derives from the effective way Heaney builds up a totally convincing account of a childhood experience that deals with the excitement, pain and confusion of growing up. The poem has a generally upbeat mood, and is written with a child like feel to it, which is shown by Heaneys use of the words, ‘mammy’ and ‘daddy’ frog. Alternatively, ‘The Early Purges’ has an upsetting and fearsome mood and tone to the poem.
‘The Early Purges’ is an ambivalent poem. Seamus Heaney’s poem could be seen in two different ways. The reader can see the poem as the record of a child’s emotional development through time, his coming to terms with practical realities in moving from sentimentality to realism (innocence to experience.) On the other hand, ‘The Early Purges’ could be viewed as a portrayal of a desensitising process that people experience, the escalation of an uncaring and indifferent attitude to our fellow creatures.
Unlike ‘The Early Purges’, ‘Death of a Naturalist’ only has one meaning to the poem. It is concerned with growing up and loss of innocence. The poet vividly describes a childhood experience that precipitates a change in the boy from the receptive and protected innocence of childhood to the fear and uncertainty of adolescence.
The idea of taking innocence and experience as a topic does not originate from Seamus Heaney (1939-). William Blake (1757-1827) was one of the first poets that wrote poems based on the theme of innocence and experience. Despite the fact that both poets were born in different centuries, they both have similarities in their poems and writing styles, and also some differences. In both Blake and Heaney poems, you read the innocence poem first, then the experience. After reading this experience section, you begin to wonder if the innocence part really is so innocent after all. It is the style of writing that both the poets use that suggest to you that the innocence poem, may also have a second meaning to it, and certain words may have different meanings than to what you first thought.
A similarity between Blake and Heaney is that both poets use their poems as ways to criticise society for what they believe is wrong. Blake and Heaney write their poems on controversial matters, such as child labour (‘The Chimney Sweeper’) and animal cruelty (‘The Early Purges’).
Both poems have complex experience sections. In the experience section of ‘Death of a Naturalist’, everything changes. This change is marked by differences in tone, diction, imagery, movement and sound. The world is now a threatening place, full of ugliness and menace. However, it is not the world that has changed so much as the boy’s perception of it. 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’. The child in the poem of ‘Death of a Naturalist’ faces the harsh realities of life in the experience section of the poem. As a child he had simply collected the frogspawn; now he begins to reflect on the meaning and consequences of his actions. He feels he will be punished for what he has done, ‘The great slime kings/Were gathered there for vengeance.’ He has become aware not only of his own individual existence, but also of that of other living things.
In ‘The Early Purges’, the experience section of the poem shows how the child has emotionally developed from a sensitive child, to a practically thinking adolescent. In the final stanza Heaney criticises the idealistic attitude of town dwellers towards animals, who regard deaths on farms as ‘unnatural’. Towards the end of the poem, Heaney regards his squeamish feelings as a child as ‘false sentiments’ and thinks of his childhood reactions as a mistake. In the final line of the poem, there is a hint of sarcasm and irony in a cliché that Heaney uses, as he speaks of kittens as ‘pests’ that ‘have to be kept down’. This, in my view, is a criticism towards farm dwellers who believe in the culling of animals.
The reader can see both of these poems as a criticism of society. Heaney vividly illustrates images in the reader’s mind for both the innocence and experience sections of the poem. In both poems, the innocence sections are from childhood. The experience sections in both poems show how the child’s perceptions of the world have changed, and how the world is a place of uncertainty. In both poems, Heaney effectively shows the change from innocence to experience. This change is marked by differences in tone, diction, imagery, movement, sound and even structure. Heaney uses all of these to successfully show the transition of innocence to experience in ‘The Early Purges’ and ‘Death of a Naturalist’.