Seamus Heaney and his literary legacy

The Subject of "Death" To the "Naturalist" According to Heaney The premise of naturalism is the philosophical argument that all phenomena and events, all experiences and impulses can be explained by the dictate of natural law. This is to say that man's experience especially must be understood through this lens. Few poets would explore the boundaries of this idea as would Irish born poet and Nobel Prize winner Seam Heaney. (Forbes, 1) As he remains active even today, Heaney graces us with a body of work that includes many of the barest and most compelling poetic renderings of nature's force to impinge upon the experience of man. It is perhaps a point of irony, therefore, that one of his most prominent pieces and the titular inspiration for a 1966 collection that helped to cement his vaunted reputation would be called "Death of a Naturalist. Indeed, it sets upon us the impression that the poet has undergone some experience which has caused him to disavow this lens. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth, which leaves us impelled to explore this work and others to better understand what is meant by the 'death' of this 'naturalist.' We are aided in this task by understanding something of the boy who was born on a County Derry farm in Northern Ireland but whose formative experiences would be interrupted by the cultural shift in a move to the Republic of Ireland. (Forbes, 1) This experience would provoke a transition in his life that helps to shed some light on the subject at hand. Indeed, "for a young poet like Heaney, born into a life-pattern he knows he must leave, the first imperative psychological task is to define his own selfhood." (Vendler, 78) Perhaps the most important idea that we would want to explore here is less this idea of selfhood, which is not as prominent a theme in the naturalist discussion at hand, than this idea of being forced to leave behind places of warmth and comfort. The implicit theme of lost innocence will tie into the alternating warmth and foreboding of nature in Heaney's lifetime of work. As we explore here below, there may be little rationality in conceding to the idea that the naturalist in Heaney had ever died, but perhaps he did suffer a sickness of the soul. In many ways, it may be more appropriate to suggest that this impression was rather an evolution in the poet's perception. The idea that the naturalist in him had ceased to be is obviously rather inconsistent with a lifetime of work that suggests an intense focus on this area of life. Even until very late in an output which continues to expand, Heaney has demonstrated a commitment to themes suggesting nature as the primary lens through which to view the world and all its phenomena. So is this underscored by the Ireland (2008) article which describes a Heaney poetry reading at Harvard University just past year. In addition to the effusive praise which it heaped upon his demeanor, work and reading, the article drew liberally from various works committed by the poet in the last two decades. These do vocally denote a preoccupation which nature as the primary effecter of man's experience. This is denoted by a 1984 poem which the article tells Heaney made as a gift to Harvard. Entitled "Alphabets," the poem describes the wondering child in his first encounters with the written and spoken language, "as from his small window/The astronaut sees all he has sprung from." The simile provokes an impression of man as a product of the natural world, an impression that seems inherent enough until one contrasts it to the modern egocentricity of man, who may rather view himself as a thing of great, self-made importance. To this end, it seems certain that Heaney is at least relatively a naturalist throughout the course of his professional life. From the deeply spiritual to the decidedly pedestrian, the subjects which invoke his attention are painted with the brushstrokes of a landscape artist, nearly all the examples provided by the Ireland text suggest a career compelled by the observations made in nature's surrounding stimuli. A poem which he reads during his 2008 visit to Harvard entitled "The Rain Stick" offers a deeply evocative telling of the sounds of nature. Here, he tells, "... And now here comes/A sprinkle of drops out of the freshened leaves/Then subtle little wets off grass and daisies/Then glitter-drizzle, almost-breaths of air . . . You are like a rich man entering heaven/Through the ear of a raindrop." (Ireland, 1) A man who professes to so clearly and deeply experience the richness of all nature's senses may be unlikely to insist today to the death of the naturalist within him. It is therefore that we are inclined to add the scrutiny applied to the startling poem, "Death of a Naturalist" also to the life of Seamus Heaney as a means to interpreting the motive for the eulogy of his internal naturalist. Truthfully, there is little mystery as to the autobiographical force which directed his pen at this point in his life, demonstrated more explicitly by such works as "Mid-term Break," where he tells in no uncertain detail of the death of his four year old brother by automobile accident. As perhaps a recurrent theme relating to the naturalist proclivity toward description through the senses more than through the psyche, he describes his auditory experience upon learning of his brother's death. He opens the poem speaking of the tense duration before he was to be joined with his already grieving family, telling that "I sat all morning in the college sick bay. Counting bells knelling classes to a close." (Heaney) This lonely imagery is offered in the stead of actually telling us that this was the place where he learned of the tragedy. And in a manner that follows the rationality of the naturalist, the remainder of the poem is also starkly put, with any emotional demonstration exhibited by the subjects; his mother, his father and the men of his town. The poet would not offer here any greater indication of his own emotional disposition beyond the toned description of the world surrounding him. This is a distinctly naturalist disposition, to separate one's self from the egoistic experience of understanding something as personal as tragedy, instead using this to key into something about the human experience, inherently afflicted as it is by suffering and unspeakable sorrow. To dispense with the trite elaboration on his own endurance of this condition, Heaney instead explores this experience with an eye to the sensory perception of grief. This is important to our understanding of the 'death' which occurs in the title poem of his 1966 collection. This more abstract one, it would seem, is directly entangled with the very concrete encounter with mortality represented in his brother's untimely passing. The two stanzas that constitute a poem which is extremely dense in descriptive detail and yet surprising in the degree to which it strikes at the readers emotional core are directly contrasted from one another in perspective. There is a sense of the before and after in the experience of trolling the flax-dam for frogspawn. In the first stanza, Heaney's description is a beautiful yearning extrapolation on a suspended moment in childhood, where the gritty and unpredictable qualities of the natural world fill the narrator with wonder and a sense of innocent joy. He tells of the dam pond that "Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles / Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell. / There were dragon-flies, spotted butterflies, / But best of all was the warm thick slobber / Of frogspawn that few like clotted water." (Heaney) The thick description that is a trademark of Heaney's comes out here in a loving reflection of himself as a child, seeming to be relatively carefree in the context of a rich ecosystem. The youthful innocence is underscored by Heaney's content and linguistic approach alike. Describing the archetypal childhood expedition through the thorny wilds of one's extended backyard, he tells of filling "jampotfuls of the jellied / specks to range on window-sills at home." (Heaney) Or in his reference to mammy and to Miss Walls, Heaney indulges in the portrayal of his speaker as truly being a child on the cusp of some revelation. It helps to provide the particular poem with the voice of very young speaker portrayed. This is important for the revelatory outcome of this poem, revealed in the second stanza. Though the first stanza is sunny in explicit description and in tone, the ecology which it describes comports itself on terms such as 'festered,' 'rotted,' 'slobber,' and 'gauze of sound.' These are terms meant not to denote an ugliness but to speak with frankness of an ecology in which the production of new life such as is here described is precipitated on death and decay. The naturalness, the inherency and the sheer inexorable reality of death comes to roost in the tone of the far more disturbing second stanza. A deep and horrifying malaise hangs over the images described here. To be sure, it seems that there is something more than just the changing of the seasons which affects the speaker and which afflicts his perspective so dramatically. He tells that "Then one hot day when fields were rank / With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs / Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges / To a coarse croaking that I had not heard / Before." (Heaney, 1) This is a moment of ominous dread. The optimistic cycle where death had given way to life in the first stanza-a decidedly naturalist embrace of the wonder that is life-is now described as a threatening and mysterious force somewhat beyond the comprehension or experience of the young speaker. The language becomes decidedly more aggressive and far bleaker, describing 'gross-bellied frogs,' with a 'slap and plop' like 'obscene threats.' He describes them as 'poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.' In all of this, there is dually a visual description of nature as producing something horrific and literally sickening to behold, as well as a presentation of nature as something dangerous and weaponized against him. It is here that, in attempting to deal with the primary question of the research investigation, we must return to the issue of Heaney's real life brother. This is the catalyzing force driving the change in the poet's feelings toward nature, bringing him face to face with its awesome power to give life and to take it away. The nature which could be so gentle and generous in breathing experience into his little brother had been dangerous and terrible in taking him away at only four years of age. For Heaney, the dramatic experience described by "Death of a Naturalist" is one that suggests the poet's love for nature has been deprived by some impossible to endure terror. The final sentence of the poem is both compelling to this end and revealing of the poet's psyche only in its attention to the natural responses around him. Here, fear dominates him. Before running in abject horror from the dam which, only in the days prior as described in the first stanza, had been a playground to him, he provides an appropriately childlike interpretation of the experience. He observes that "the great slime kings / Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew / That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it." (Heaney) This last is a rather important sentiment to parse in trying to determine if the naturalist in Heaney had ever truly died. The description offers firstly a indication that the speaker sees himself as somehow guilty and deserving of the dangerous and threats which seem to be prevented to him. Certainly, this may be the poet's depiction of a child's mind in its own inherent guilt and unwanted self-consciousness, or it may be an indication that the speaker is truly aware of some wrong that he is committed and for which he will suffer great anxiety. More importantly though is the very clear idea that leaves us with a hollow and unique sort of revulsion. The idea that to dip his hand in the dark murkiness of the decaying swamp water would be to be 'clutched' by something horrible and invisible is quite revealing of a new and unwanted interpretation of nature. Through his eyes, we see this as a force with the capacity to be vengeful, awful and fully without mercy. The violent accident that took his brother's life and the narrative experience of enduring this tragedy, which Heaney offers us unflinchingly, provides Heaney with an experience that alters his understanding of nature. Certainly it doesn't diminish his appreciation for it, or at least his attention to detail there within. But it does manifest a greater sense of foreboding of what it means to be a man at the mercy of nature's irresistible force. There is demonstrated a greater respect for that which is fully implied by naturalism. The vulnerability and helpless that we see in the boy sitting in his college's infirmary is the very same as the dread and uncertainty in the boy at the flax-dam, and most significantly, the very same as the sense of smallness felt to the astronaut peering out of a window at his planet. The invocation of nature as something both beautiful and perilous is entitled "The Death of a Naturalist" but might more aptly be referred to as his revelation, or perhaps the death of his innocence. The title is not erroneous per se, but at least misleading in a retrospect on Heaney's career. If it is not fair even to suggest that the title is erroneous, perhaps the sentiment is simply stated indirectly. The death of Heaney's brother is tantamount to the death of a sensibility in him. Perhaps the sensibility that in the human experience, suffering and tragedy bring individuals closer to an awareness of their vulnerability and their ultimately mortality. With his brother's passing, Heaney came to a new understanding of nature which would set to revelation the idea that the naturalist must in his deference to nature, accept his own relative impotence. If anything, this appreciation only intensifies the naturalist in Heaney, with the output to follow bespeaking an even greater emphasis on the degree to which nature brings together all things in this cycle of life and death. In fact, this does bring some epiphany to our discussion. In the sentiment which refers to the 'death of a naturalist,' we may more abstractly read this as exploration of 'death' to a naturalist. Namely, much of Heaney's preoccupation with nature becomes manifested in his exploration of the inherently natural subject of death. Perhaps this is most stunningly connoted in a work that both explicitly deals with his brother's passing and the ebb and flow of nature's cycle. In "St. Kevin and the Blackbird," Heaney offers a rather Buddhist principle in an imagined return of his brother to the natural phenomenological process. Describing a 'cell' which the reader might presume as the same space as the 4 foot coffin, he tells of "St. Kevin" whose "One turned-up palm is out the window, stiff / As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands / And lays in it and settles down to nest." (Heaney) The poem goes on to intersperse uncertainty as to how Kevin is or is not experiencing the tactile sensations of the life blossoming in his dead palm. The poem states rather explicitly the naturalist proposition that "Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked / Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked / Into the network of eternal life." (Heaney) This invocation of the network and the idea of eternal life recounts the theme first described by "Death of a Naturalist" where the transition between death and life leaves blurry the line between the two. The poet who comes to understand that these two things are intertwined and interdependent is the same who by the composition of "St. Kevin" no longer speaks of the cycle with the guilt or dread driven by personal psyche in the aforementioned poem. Instead, there is only the uncertainty and inquisitiveness prompted by the abyssal nature of death with respect to the experience of life. The contrast could not be made more clear than it in St. Kevin, where the poet says of the subject, "now he must how his hand / Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks / Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown." (Heaney) This is a remarkable bit of imagery in which we may find some redemption. The moment of 'death' described in the two stanzas of marked difference in "Death of a Naturalist" takes on a different emotional proportion in this work. Instead here it promotes a greater appreciation of the completeness and continuity between life and death, necessarily coexistent as they are. As Heaney's later career would advance, it would do so under the auspices of what we learn were increasingly vocal political dispositions. Reasserting his Irish identity and using this as a beacon for objection to British political occupation and aggression, Heaney would prove himself the ultimate naturalist. Channeling his commitment to the principles of natural law into a political perspective which objected to the violations of human rights that he felt were clear, Heaney would undeniably be a naturalist of immensely dedicated proportions even to present date. (Wikipedia, 1) Furthermore, it seems clear by his work that at no point would he ever have wished to deny this identity or philosophy.