Continuing my preparation for teaching Death of a Naturalist, these two poems sit at the centre of the collection and lie at the heart of any discussion of Heritage and of the meaning of Irishness explored in the poems. We …
Tag: death of a naturalist
Follower, Heaney: thoughts on metre and language
Follower -note the lack of an article suggesting the whole range of potential meanings and sub-meanings to the word. Heaney is writing literally of a boy who followed his father around the fields and farm in his youth and who …
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Death of a Naturalist: a study in innocence.
In Death of a Naturalist, the title poem of the collection, Heaney explores ideas which will be key to these poems – the conflict inherent between innocence and experience and the sense of terror which drives a young man towards …
Churning Day: Heaney. An analysis.
Another of the poems in the collection which considers the aging process as a conflict between innocence and experience, ultimately resulting in an epiphany as the older Heaney recognises the mundanity of something hitherto regarded as bordering on the magical …
On Personal Helicon: Heaney.
Personal Helicon for Michael Longley 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. One, in …
Exploring Blackberry Picking: Heaney. An essay.
Blackberry Picking is a poem rich in imagery and symbolism -from the macabre linking of the fruit to a ‘plate of eyes’ capable of staring at the young Heaney and intensifying his sense of guilt, to the link between this …
Preparing for Heaney: Death of a Naturalist. OCR A level NEA
Preparing for NEA: Death of a Naturalist, Heaney. This summer I am reading Heaney’s first anthology: Death of a Naturalist, as preparation for the OCR A level NEA close-study-task, which I will be teaching next term. As usual, it …
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