Death of a Naturalist- Explain Heaney’s View of Nature and How It Changes

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Explain Heaney’s view of nature and how it changes ‘Death of a Naturalist’ was written by Seamus Heaney in 1987. Seamus Heaney was born on the 13th of April in 1939, onto a small family farm called ‘Mossbawn’, in County Derry, Northern Ireland. Heaney was the eldest member in a family of nine, and grew up as a ‘country boy’ and rural County Londonderry is where much of his poetry is grounded. At the age of twelve he won a scholarship to St. Columb’s College, Catholic boarding school forty miles from his home. After this, Heaney lived in Belfast between 1957 and 1972 and then moved south to Dublin, where he currently lives with his wife and 3 children. Seamus Heaney’s poetry first became noticed in the mid-1960’s. In the poem ‘Death of a Naturalist’, the author develops the voice of an adult speaker looking back on his childhood, demonstrating how, as a young boy, his perception of the same environment saddened matured and altered, essentially providing a new way of looking at the dramatic change between childhood and adulthood, and displaying how over time, peoples interpretation of their surroundings and of society around them will inevitably change and develop. To highlight this development, Heaney establishes a definite structure, exposing the two different interpretations, and uses repetitively distinct and descriptive diction to expose the crucial development of the character in a constant setting, revealing the main themes of the poem. The structure of the poem is suited to its purpose- to consider the drive behind two different approaches to the same situation; growing up. The poem has two definitive sections, and is divided into two stanzas. The first stanza clearly displays a picture of innocence, as the child looks upon everything in his surroundings with an idealistic view. In such a grim, unpleasant, swampy environment, he says, "Best of all was the

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