The following version of this poem was used to create this guide: Heaney, Seamus. “Death of a Naturalist.” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57040/death-of-a-naturalist.

Note that all parenthetical citations refer to the line number from which the quotation is taken.

"Death of a Naturalist" is a 33-line poem of two irregular stanzas by Irish poet Seamus Heaney. Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 and was offered the role of poet laureate in the UK; however, Heaney turned down the offer due to political tensions between England and Ireland. This poem comes from his very first collection, Death of a Naturalist, a volume which drew widely from his childhood in mid-twentieth-century Ireland. He achieved immediate success for the accessibility and rural qualities (sometimes compared to Robert Frost in the United States) of his work. Here, those images come together to describe a young boy’s rupture from the curiosity and wonder of his youth.