The Language of Seamus Heaney's Death of a Naturalist Successfully Evokes the Texture of Rural Life

There are many themes in "Death of a Naturalist" and these are often played out against imagery, situations, descriptions and a background that constantly evoke the texture of Irish rural life. Often the focus is on the act of writing itself. Heaney`s ploughmen, thatcher, diviners and diggers are all figures of the poet at work. Interestingly enough these role models are all men. Heaney`s childhood world, true to life on an Irish farm in the forties, was a place where men and women had definite gendered roles. The aforementioned were all male farm roles while the blackberry picking was children's work and it was the mother who took first turn at the crocks in "Churning Day". In the same vein it is the women who pray in "Poor Women in a City Church" while it is the man Dan Taggart who impassively drowns the kittens, "the scraggy wee shits" in The Early Purges". It is Heaney`s mother who holds his hand in "Mid Term Break" while his father is uncharacteristically, for a male, showing emotion, "He had always taken funerals in his stride".

Whatever one thinks about these gender issues certainly they accurately evoke the situation and texture of rural life in Ireland in the forties. Another theme examined by Heaney is that of death, both literal and metaphorical. He writes about the poignant death of his young brother in "Mid Term Break" but he also writes about the loss of childhood innocence.  All of this happens against a background of intimate domestic rural warmth and family affection that is nevertheless always being impinged upon by another not so safe world: the adult world of Northern Ireland. As he says in, "The Early Purges". "But on well-run farms pests have to be kept down." Yet the texture of the farm is ever-present. In "Blackberry Picking" the hunt for ripe sweet blackberries happens amongst this agricultural backdrop.

...That hunger

Sent us with milk cans, pea tins, jam pots

Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our Boots.

Round hayfields, cornfields and potato drills.

We trekked and picked until the cans were full,

But also in this idyllic world there are "thorn pricks" and the memory of a murdering pirate named Bluebeard. And while still in the "byre" of this pastoral setting, things start to go bad,

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.

But when the bath was filled we found a fur,

A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.

The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush,

The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.

But true to locale it was in the "byre" the bath of berries was kept, not the sort of thing one could keep in a modern three bed roomed semi. Heaney was born in April 1939, on a small farm near Casltedawson, Co. Derry and it is from this milieu of this first world that much of the primary material in "Death of a Naturalist" issues. He was the eldest in a Catholic family of nine children. The inane clichй, "Have you no TV," usually reserved for members of large families was totally appropriate in Heaney`s case. Nobody had television then. Instead of staring into "the box" for entertainment the young farm boy enjoyed instead the simple outdoor country pleasures of staring, "big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring", or well. In the first stanza of "Personal Helicon" he tells us,

As a child, they could not keep me from wells

And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.

I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells

Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

Of course these memories of wells from his first world are used as an analogy for the art of poetry and inspiration. They also represent other poets and their poems that have influenced him: Hughes, Kavanagh and Wordsworth. In "Death of a Naturalist" Heaney is experimenting with different styles and manners and is rhyming his own experiences with these fellow poets, "Others had echoes, gave back your own call/ With a clean new music in it, "And" I rhyme/To see myself, to set the darkness echoing".

Much of the imagery and personal memories of his rustic heritage and its landscape is communicated in a very sensuous, rich and direct language. One can virtually feel the texture of the thing described. One can almost palpably experience the very act of digging in, "the course boot nestled on the lug, the shaft/ Against the inside knee was levered firmly. " Similarly the, " cool hardness in our hands" of the new potatoes and the "milk in a bottle/ Corked sloppily with paper", are very tactile, almost tangible, evocations of the act described. Neil Corcoran alludes to this when he writes,

Digging potatoes and turf, picking blackberries, shooting, churning

Butter and ploughing are all rendered in poems which, like the

synaesthetic blur of the bluebottles in "Death pf a Naturalist" itself,

Weave strong gauze of sound around their occasions. The most

Obvious characteristics of this sound are its onomatopoeia and its

alterative effects.

This onomatopoeia as I "the