By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The title poem in Heaney’s debut poetry collection Death of a Naturalist, published in 1966, ‘Death of a Naturalist’ is a deceptively simple poem about how the fascination and curiosity we feel in early childhood gives way to fear and disgust when we reach adolescence. You can read ‘Death of a Naturalist’ here before proceeding to our analysis of the poem below.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) was one of the greatest and most popular English-language poets of the late twentieth century, and he continued to write into the current century. He was also the best-loved of the group of Irish poets who came to prominence in the second half of the twentieth century.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Digging’ appeared in Seamus Heaney’s first collection, Death of a Naturalist, in 1966. Like a number of the sonnets by Tony Harrison – who was born two years before Heaney – ‘Digging’ is about a poet-son’s relationship with his father and the sense that the working-class son, by choosing the vocation of the poet (but then who chooses it?
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Seamus Heaney’s ‘Blackberry-Picking’ is one of the great twentieth-century poems about disappointment, or, more specifically, about that moment in our youth when we realise that things will never live up to our high expectations. Heaney uses the specific act of picking blackberries to explore this theme.
You can read ‘Blackberry-Picking’ here; below we offer a brief analysis of Heaney’s poem in terms of its language, meaning, and principal themes.