Katie E Payne
English Language
Seamus Heaney
Compare Heaney’s feelings towards growth and development from childhood to adulthood, using the literary and linguistic devices in ‘Blackberry-Picking’ and ‘Death of A Naturalist’ By Seamus Heaney.
Blackberry Picking gives a lucid description of basically, picking blackberries. However it is really about hope and disappointment and how things never quite live up to expectations. ‘Blackberry picking’ becomes a metaphor for other experiences such as the lack of optimism already being realised at an early age and the sense of naivety looked upon from an adult analysing his childhood; “Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not”, consequently a sense of regret. Death of A Naturalist is similar to Blackberry Picking in its subject and structure. Here, too Heaney explains a change in his attitude to the natural world, in a poem that falls also into two parts, a somewhat idyllic past and present torn by various conflicts. The experience is almost like a nightmare, as Heaney witnesses a plague of frogs comparable to something from the Old Testament.
In the first section of Blackberry Picking, Heaney 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”, this simile is a representation of a man whose hands were covered with the blood of his wives. This is an unmistakable connotation of aggressive excitement in the picking of the berries; an almost hidden undertone of the death of nature, thus an ending to his pleasure. This first half of the poem Heaney describes the picking – from the appearance of the fruit to the frenzy of activity as more fruit ripens. The tripling used suggests the lexis is one of confusion and passion; “Sent us out with milk-cans, pea-tins, jam-pots”. Likewise to Blackberry Picking, Death of A Naturalist also has a fairly simple structure. In the first section, Heaney describes how the frogs would spawn in the lint hole, with a digression into him collecting the spawn, and how his teacher encouraged his childish interest in the process. The poem’s title is amusingly ironic – by a ‘naturalist’, we would normally mean someone with expert scientific knowledge of living things and ecology. The young Heaney certainly was beginning to know nature from direct observation – but this incident cut short the possible scientific career before it had ever begun. Also by ‘death of a naturalist’ he does not wish to be a part of this life. The poet notes the festering in the flax-dam, but can cope with this familiar lexis of things rotting and spawn hatching. Perhaps, as an inquisitive child he felt some pride in not being squeamish – he thinks of the bubbles form the process as gargling ‘delicately’. There is a nostalgic feeling as he continues to take his childhood for granted. He has an almost scientific interest in knowing the proper names “bullfrog” and “frogspawn” rather than the teacher’s patronizing talk of “mummy” and “daddy”, this development is possibly the main lexis throughout and the juvenile language represents his loss of innocence; this is his first knowledge of reproduction and sex, for that reason his innocence is lost through a lack of understanding.
