Death of a Naturalist: A study of Seamus Heaney?s first book of poems.

closing of a Naturalist A study of Seamus Heaneys first admit of poesys.Seamus Heaney, the famed Irish poet, was the product of two completely different social and psychological orders. Living on a small farm of some l acres in County Derry in Northern Ireland (Nobel eMuseum), Seamus Heaneys childhood was spent primarily in the company of nature and the local wildlife. His father, a public by the name of Patrick Heaney, had a penchant for farming and working the land. Seamus mother Marg art, in contrast, was a woman born into a family called McCann, whos major dealings were with occupation dealings, trade and the modern world (Nobel eMuseum). Patrick Heaney was a man of few words, and preferred the quiet life of a farmer to the vocal world of trade and industry. Marg atomic number 18t Heaney was in fact quite the opposite and believed in speaking out, being heard and was seldom shy in expressing her feelings (Nobel eMuseum). These two extreme contrasts were enormously influent ial in the shaping of Seamus as a man and as a poet, and his first book Death of a Naturalist is a testament to this. Death of a Naturalist focuses on nature and wildlife as well as human emotions, and using poetry as his medium, Seamus Heaney shows his readers with specific reference to love and death, the images of nature that are associated with his father, and intertwines them with the human feelings and emotions that are closely linked with his mother.Love is a prominent theme in Seamus Heaneys first book of poems, and it is worthwhile noting that just ace year after Heaney married the love of his life, a woman named Mary Devlin, that Heaney wrote and released Death of a Naturalist (Nobel eMuseum). It might be confusing for one to figure a relationship between the wild and natural world and a human characteristic such as love, but Seamus Heaney manages to bring the two themes together in a deeply poetic and fitting fashion. In the poem Twice Shy, love is the governing premis e. Twice Shy revolves around the idea of vernal lovers playing a game of hunter and the hunted, and with references to both nature as well as human emotions, Heaney displays the influences that were instilled in him as a young man by his parents. In the second stanza, the influence is unmistakable as Heaney describes a situation in which two lovers are trying to conform to the traditions of courting, but are consumed ... ...ons in drills. (Heaney 23). The men aboard the drifting ship are starving to death and demand to be fed by the captain, but when he refuses them food, in whines and snarls their desperation / Rose and fell like a flock of starving gulls (Heaney 23). By describing the mens eyes as being like reflect onions and by comparing the men as being like birds, Heaney brings nature into a mix of human feeling once more, thus creating a poem where impending death can be a topic that is both animalistic as well as human and emotionally expressive. Within Death of a Natural ist, Seamus Heaney explores many different aspects of life in Ireland. With his constant references to both the natural world and the very different topic of human emotion, Seamus Heaney designed a book of poems that shows readers that a connection between the two can exist. Death of a Naturalist is a book that in a totally extraordinary way bonds love, death, nature and emotion in a fashion that echoes both Patrick and Margaret Heaneys dominant character traits.Works CitedHeaney, Seamus. Death of a Naturalist. Chatham, Kent Faber and Faber Limited, 1999.Seamus Heaney Biography Nobel eMuseum. November 15, 2001.