Death of a Naturalist: Poems

Death of a Naturalist: Poems

by Seamus Heaney
Death of a Naturalist: Poems

Death of a Naturalist: Poems

by Seamus Heaney

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Overview

Death of a Naturalist (1966) marked the auspicious debut of Seamus Heaney, a universally acclaimed master of modern literature. As a first book of poems, it is remarkable for its accurate perceptions and rich linguistic gifts.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781466864078
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date: 02/04/2014
Sold by: Macmillan
Format: eBook
Pages: 58
Sales rank: 630,499
File size: 182 KB

About the Author

Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. His poems, plays, translations, and essays include Opened Ground, Electric Light, Beowulf, The Spirit Level, District and Circle, and Finders Keepers. Robert Lowell praised Heaney as the "most important Irish poet since Yeats."

Read an Excerpt

Death of a Naturalist


By Seamus Heaney

Faber and Faber, Inc.

Copyright © 2014 Seamus Heaney
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-6407-8



CHAPTER 1

DIGGING
    Between my finger and my thumb
    The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

    Under my window, a clean rasping sound
    When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
    My father, digging. I look down

    Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
    Bends low, comes up twenty years away
    Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
    Where he was digging.

    The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
    Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
    He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
    To scatter new potatoes that we picked
    Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

    By God, the old man could handle a spade.
    Just like his old man.

    My grandfather cut more turf in a day
    Than any other man on Toner's bog.
    Once I carried him milk in a bottle
    Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
    To drink it, then fell to right away

    Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
    Over his shoulder, going down and down
    For the good turf. Digging.

    The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
    Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
    Through living roots awaken in my head.
    But I've no spade to follow men like them.

    Between my finger and my thumb
    The squat pen rests.
    I'll dig with it.


    DEATH OF A NATURALIST


    All year the flax-dam festered in the heart
    Of the townland; green and heavy headed
    Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
    Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
    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 grew like clotted water
    In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring
    I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied
    Specks to range on window-sills at home,
    On shelves at school, and wait and watch until
    The fattening dots burst into nimble-
    Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how
    The daddy frog was called a bullfrog
    And how he croaked and how the mammy frog
    Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was
    Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too
    For they were yellow in the sun and brown
    In rain.

        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. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
    Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked
    On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
    The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
    Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
    I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
    Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
    That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.


    THE BARN

    Threshed corn lay piled like grit of ivory
    Or solid as cement in two-lugged sacks.
    The musty dark hoarded an armoury
    Of farmyard implements, harness, plough-socks.

    The floor was mouse-grey, smooth, chilly concrete.
    There were no windows, just two narrow shafts
    Of gilded motes, crossing, from air-holes slit
    High in each gable. The one door meant no draughts

    All summer when the zinc burned like an oven.
    A scythe's edge, a clean spade, a pitch-fork's prongs:
    Slowly bright objects formed when you went in.
    Then you felt cobwebs clogging up your lungs

    And scuttled fast into the sunlit yard.
    And into nights when bats were on the wing
    Over the rafters of sleep, where bright eyes stared
    From piles of grain in corners, fierce, unblinking.

    The dark gulfed like a roof-space. I was chaff
    To be pecked up when birds shot through the air-slits.
    I lay face-down to shun the fear above.
    The two-lugged sacks moved in like great blind rats.


    AN ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING

    I took the embankment path
    (As always, deferring
    The bridge). The river nosed past,
    Pliable, oil-skinned, wearing

    A transfer of gables and sky.
    Hunched over the railing,
    Well away from the road now, I
    Considered the dirty-keeled swans.

    Something slobbered curtly, close,
    Smudging the silence: a rat
    Slimed out of the water and
    My throat sickened so quickly that

    I turned down the path in cold sweat
    But God, another was nimbling
    Up the far bank, tracing its wet
    Arcs on the stones. Incredibly then

    I established a dreaded
    Bridgehead. I turned to stare
    With deliberate, thrilled care
    At my hitherto snubbed rodent.

    He clockworked aimlessly a while,
    Stopped, back bunched and glistening,
    Ears plastered down on his knobbed skull,
    Insidiously listening.

    The tapered tail that followed him,
    The raindrop eye, the old snout:
    One by one I took all in.
    He trained on me. I stared him out

    Forgetting how I used to panic
    When his grey brothers scraped and fed
    Behind the hen-coop in our yard,
    On ceiling boards above my bed.

    This terror, cold, wet-furred, small-clawed,
    Retreated up a pipe for sewage.
    I stared a minute after him.
    Then I walked on and crossed the bridge.


    BLACKBERRY-PICKING

    For Philip Hobsbaum

    Late August, given heavy rain and sun
    For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
    At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
    Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
    You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
    Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
    Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
    Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
    Sent us out with milk-cans, pea-tins, jam-pots
    Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
    Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
    We trekked and picked until the cans were full,
    Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
    With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
    Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
    With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.

    We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
    But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
    A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
    The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
    The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
    I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
    That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
    Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.


    CHURNING DAY

    A thick crust, coarse-grained as limestone rough-cast,
    hardened gradually on top of the four crocks
    that stood, large pottery bombs, in the small pantry.
    After the hot brewery of gland, cud and udder
    cool porous earthenware fermented the buttermilk
    for churning day, when the hooped churn was scoured
    with plumping kettles and the busy scrubber
    echoed daintily on the seasoned wood.
    It stood then, purified, on the flagged kitchen floor.

    Out came the four crocks, spilled their heavy lip
    of cream, their white insides, into the sterile churn.
    The staff, like a great whisky muddler fashioned
    in deal wood, was plunged in, the lid fitted.
    My mother took first turn, set up rhythms
    that slugged and thumped for hours. Arms ached.
    Hands blistered. Cheeks and clothes were spattered

    with flabby milk.
        Where finally gold flecks
    began to dance. They poured hot water then,
    sterilized a birchwood-bowl
    and little corrugated butter-spades.
    Their short stroke quickened, suddenly
    a yellow curd was weighting the churned up white,
    heavy and rich, coagulated sunlight
    that they fished, dripping, in a wide tin strainer,
    heaped up like gilded gravel in the bowl.

    The house would stink long after churning day,
    acrid as a sulphur mine. The empty crocks
    were ranged along the wall again, the butter
    in soft printed slabs was piled on pantry shelves.
    And in the house we moved with gravid ease,
    our brains turned crystals full of clean deal churns,
    the plash and gurgle of the sour-breathed milk,
    the pat and slap of small spades on wet lumps.


    THE EARLY PURGES

    I was six when I first saw kittens drown.
    Dan Taggart pitched them, 'the scraggy wee shits',
    Into a bucket; a frail metal sound,

    Soft paws scraping like mad. But their tiny din
    Was soon soused. They were slung on the snout
    Of the pump and the water pumped in.

    'Sure isn't it better for them now?' Dan said.
    Like wet gloves they bobbed and shone till he sluiced
    Them out on the dunghill, glossy and dead.

    Suddenly frightened, for days I sadly hung
    Round the yard, watching the three sogged remains
    Turn mealy and crisp as old summer dung

    Until I forgot them. But the fear came back
    When Dan trapped big rats, snared rabbits, shot crows
    Or, with a sickening tug, pulled old hens' necks.

    Still, living displaces false sentiments
    And now, when shrill pups are prodded to drown
    I just shrug, 'Bloody pups'. It makes sense:

    'Prevention of cruelty' talk cuts ice in town
    Where they consider death unnatural,
    But on well-run farms pests have to be kept down.


    FOLLOWER


    My father worked with a horse-plough,
    His shoulders globed like a full sail strung
    Between the shafts and the furrow.
    The horses strained at his clicking tongue.

    An expert. He would set the wing
    And fit the bright steel-pointed sock.
    The sod rolled over without breaking.
    At the headrig, with a single pluck

    Of reins, the sweating team turned round
    And back into the land. His eye
    Narrowed and angled at the ground,
    Mapping the furrow exactly.

    I stumbled in his hob-nailed wake,
    Fell sometimes on the polished sod;
    Sometimes he rode me on his back
    Dipping and rising to his plod.

    I wanted to grow up and plough,
    To close one eye, stiffen my arm.
    All I ever did was follow
    In his broad shadow round the farm.

    I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,
    Yapping always. But today
    It is my father who keeps stumbling
    Behind me, and will not go away.


    ANCESTRAL PHOTOGRAPH

    Jaws puff round and solid as a turnip,
    Dead eyes are statue's and the upper lip
    Bullies the heavy mouth down to a droop.
    A bowler suggests the stage Irishman
    Whose look has two parts scorn, two parts dead pan.
    His silver watch chain girds him like a hoop.

    My father's uncle, from whom he learnt the trade,
    Long fixed in sepia tints, begins to fade
    And must come down. Now on the bedroom wall
    There is a faded patch where he has been —
    As if a bandage had been ripped from skin —
    Empty plaque to a house's rise and fall.

    Twenty years ago I herded cattle
    Into pens or held them against a wall
    Until my father won at arguing
    His own price on a crowd of cattlemen
    Who handled rumps, groped teats, stood, paused and then
    Bought a round of drinks to clinch the bargain.

    Uncle and nephew, fifty years ago,
    Heckled and herded through the fair days too.
    This barrel of a man penned in the frame:
    I see him with the jaunty hat pushed back
    Draw thumbs out of his waistcoat, curtly smack
    Hands and sell. Father, I've watched you do the same

    And watched you sadden when the fairs were stopped.
    No room for dealers if the farmers shopped
    Like housewives at an auction ring. Your stick
    Was parked behind the door and stands there still.
    Closing this chapter of our chronicle
    I take your uncle's portrait to the attic.


    MID-TERM BREAK


    I sat all morning in the college sick bay
    Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
    At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home.

    In the porch I met my father crying —
    He had always taken funerals in his stride —
    And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

    The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
    When I came in, and I was embarrassed
    By old men standing up to shake my hand

    And tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble',
    Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
    Away at school, as my mother held my hand

    In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
    At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
    With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

    Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
    And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
    For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

    Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
    He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.
    No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

    A four foot box, a foot for every year.


    DAWN SHOOT

    Clouds ran their wet mortar, plastered the daybreak
    Grey. The stones clicked tartly
    If we missed the sleepers but mostly
    Silent we headed up the railway
    Where now the only steam was funnelling from cows
    Ditched on their rumps beyond hedges,
    Cudding, watching, and knowing.
    The rails scored a bull's-eye into the eye
    Of a bridge. A corncrake challenged
    Unexpectedly like a hoarse sentry
    And a snipe rocketed away on reconnaissance.
    Rubber-booted, belted, tense as two parachutists,
    We climbed the iron gate and dropped
    Into the meadow's six acres of broom, gorse and dew.

    A sandy bank, reinforced with coiling roots,
    Faced you, two hundred yards from the track.
    Snug on our bellies behind a rise of dead whins,
    Our ravenous eyes getting used to the greyness,
    We settled, soon had the holes under cover.
    This was the den they all would be heading for now,
    Loping under ferns in dry drains, flashing
    Brown orbits across ploughlands and grazing.

    The plaster thinned at the skyline, the whitewash
    Was bleaching on houses and stables,
    The cock would be sounding reveille
    In seconds.
    And there was one breaking
    In from the gap in the corner.

    Donnelly's left hand came up
    And came down on my barrel. This one was his.
    'For Christ's sake', I spat, 'Take your time, there'll be more'
    There was the playboy trotting up to the hole
    By the ash tree, 'Wild rover no more',
    Said Donnelly and emptied two barrels
    And got him. I finished him off.

    Another snipe catapulted into the light,
    A mare whinnied and shivered her haunches
    Up on a hill. The others would not be back
    After three shots like that. We dandered off
    To the railway; the prices were small at that time
    So we did not bother to cut out the tongue.
    The ones that slipped back when the all clear got round
    Would be first to examine him.


    AT A POTATO DIGGING


        I

    A mechanical digger wrecks the drill,
    Spins up a dark shower of roots and mould.
    Labourers swarm in behind, stoop to fill
    Wicker creels. Fingers go dead in the cold.

    Like crows attacking crow-black fields, they stretch
    A higgledy line from hedge to headland;
    Some pairs keep breaking ragged ranks to fetch
    A full creel to the pit and straighten, stand

    Tall for a moment but soon stumble back
    To fish a new load from the crumbled surf.
    Heads bow, trunks bend, hands fumble towards the black
    Mother. Processional stooping through the turf

    Recurs mindlessly as autumn. Centuries
    Of fear and homage to the famine god
    Toughen the muscles behind their humbled knees,
    Make a seasonal altar of the sod.

        II

    Flint-white, purple. They lie scattered
    like inflated pebbles. Native
    to the black hutch of clay
    where the halved seed shot and clotted
    these knobbed and slit-eyed tubers seem
    the petrified hearts of drills. Split
    by the spade, they show white as cream.

    Good smells exude from crumbled earth.
    The rough bark of humus erupts
    knots of potatoes (a clean birth)
    whose solid feel, whose wet inside
    promises taste of ground and root.
    To be piled in pits; live skulls, blind-eyed.

        III

    Live skulls, blind-eyed, balanced on
    wild higgledy skeletons
    scoured the land in 'forty-five,
    wolfed the blighted root and died.

    The new potato, sound as stone,
    putrefied when it had lain
    three days in the long clay pit.
    Millions rotted along with it.

    Mouths tightened in, eyes died hard,
    faces chilled to a plucked bird.
    In a million wicker huts
    beaks of famine snipped at guts.

    A people hungering from birth,
    grubbing, like plants, in the bitch earth,
    were grafted with a great sorrow.
    Hope rotted like a marrow.

    Stinking potatoes fouled the land,
    pits turned pus into filthy mounds:
    and where potato diggers are
    you still smell the running sore.

        IV

    Under a gay flotilla of gulls
    The rhythm deadens, the workers stop.
    Brown bread and tea in bright canfuls
    Are served for lunch. Dead-beat, they flop

    Down in the ditch and take their fill,
    Thankfully breaking timeless fasts;
    Then, stretched on the faithless ground, spill
    Libations of cold tea, scatter crusts.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from Death of a Naturalist by Seamus Heaney. Copyright © 2014 Seamus Heaney. Excerpted by permission of Faber and Faber, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Contents

Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Acknowledgements,
Digging,
Death of a Naturalist,
The Barn,
An Advancement of Learning,
Blackberry-Picking,
Churning Day,
The Early Purges,
Follower,
Ancestral Photograph,
Mid-Term Break,
Dawn Shoot,
At a Potato Digging,
For the Commander of the 'Eliza',
The Diviner,
Turkeys Observed,
Cow in Calf,
Trout,
Waterfall,
Docker,
Poor Women in a City Church,
Gravities,
Twice Shy,
Valediction,
Lovers on Aran,
Poem,
Honeymoon Flight,
Scaffolding,
Storm on the Island,
Synge on Aran,
Saint Francis and the Birds,
In Small Townlands,
The Folk Singers,
The Play Way,
Personal Helicon,
Also by Seamus Heaney,
Copyright,

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