Analysis Of Themes And Literature Devises Used In Seamus Heaney's Poems

We take for granted for most of what happens in our lives. We do not appreciate the simple pleasures offered to us because of its accessibility, but once it is gone from our reach, we beg for it once more. Growing up a rural life in Northern Ireland, Seamus Heaney expresses his personal childhood upbringing of Irish farm laborers which inspires a majority of the topics that reoccur in his poems. Heaney explores the loss of innocence by illustrating his characters experiencing impactful phases of their life that will change their perception of reality.

In “Blackberry Picking”, “Death of a Naturalist”, and “Mid Term Break”, he uses literary devices such as tone, sight and sound imagery to create contrast between childhood and adulthood experiences showcasing the excitement and curiosity of youth that later becoming dark and graphic to convey the thematic message of nothing lasting forever. The poem is divided into two stanzas showing two phases of his childhood. In the first stanza, the author speaks from a youthful perspective, recalling a childhood memory that was happy and innocent, “That first one … Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for Picking”. Heaney uses a simile to describe in a child’s mindset of the satisfaction they feel from the initial excitement of tasting the blackberry. They come into things with an optimistic viewpoint and hope but do not realize yet that what they are experiencing is only temporary. This leads to unrealistic expectations that cause disappointment when they are not fulfilled.

The use of “lust” selfishness associates with us learning how to control our greed at a young age because it demonstrates how a child’s maturity is affected by the amount of knowledge they have on reality. The use of words like “blobs” and “tinkling” provide the reader with playful diction and tone that indicated the author’s age. The tone shifts in the second stanza when he finds that the blackberries were covered in “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.” In the first stanza, the tone is greed, indulgence, excitement but then changes to disappointment and sadness in the second stanza. The negative diction creates an image that is stripped of livelihood and happiness symbolizing the loss of innocence because the author is coming face to face with reality. In result of the fruit aging, it eventually rots which represents that with time comes an inevitable death and end for everything.

Death of a Naturalist focuses on the process of maturation from obtaining knowledge and learning about the harsh reality that was once skewed by our naivety. Similar to “Blackberry Picking”, the poem is divided into two stanzas with distinct shifts in tone. Heaney talks about another childhood memory he experienced in school, “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.” Learning more about the frogs fascinated him when he was still a kid. Usually, as a child, we do not understand how reproduction works, so we are given the story of the Birds and the Bees. Referring to that memory and using nouns like “mommy” and “daddy” shows his innocence and naivety, that he slowly grows out the more he learned about the process of maturation. When he comes back that one hot day, he realizes that the “jellied specks” he took were the frogs’ offspring, he believes the frogs are ready to attack him “I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings. Were gathered there for vengeance.” This scares him off and as the title suggest, a part of his youth and urge to learn about the frogs dies. This encounter translates into his life of growing up and facing reality and how scary it can be. His use of vivid imagery and personification throughout the poem such as "sweltered in the punishing sun" and “thick slobber” gives nature unpleasant and threatening characteristics while setting the tone of repulsiveness towards nature.

After he discovers the reality of different facts about life, it ensures his loss of innocence as he gains more understanding. Through the death of his younger brother, Heaney is faced with the brutal reality of life. When he came back from school for the funeral, he does not indicate a reaction, but instead observe the environment around him, “In the porch, I met my father crying. He had always taken funerals in his stride--”. His father’s reaction to his son’s death is something he has never seen before because usually in past funerals he would not have reacted the same. To see his father broken and weak shows how the death of a loved one can make someone open to vulnerability. Heaney comes off as emotionless in such a depressing environment and feels embarrassed for getting all the attention when older men would come up to him because he is not used to an adult formality of communication. The dashes and other punctuation are used to slow down the reading and set the tone. Resembling how one would be processing and thinking about someone’s death and taking in the information because it’s overwhelming. Heaney uses this simile, “He lay in the four-foot box as in his sot”, to symbolize the state of peace his brother was in a place of safety almost like he was sleeping because the death still seemed unreal. As he looks into the coffin of his little brother, “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.” Different from the other poems, the mood here shifts from sad to a more peaceful tone when he sees his little brother cleaned up.

His use of alliteration in the last line sentence to put emphasis on how young his brother and how tiny he was in his coffin. The sudden tragedy in the family immediately forces Heaney to grow up. Literally, in the death of his four-year-old brother, there is a loss of innocence, but it also strips Heaney from his own childhood innocence by being exposed to one of the brutal realities faced in life at a young age.