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+--- Thread: "The Death Of A Naturalist" (/thread-21449.html)
"The Death Of A Naturalist" - Magical Realist - Sep 29, 2026
"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 dragonflies, 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."
"Seamus Heaney’s poem “Death of a Naturalist” evokes a change in the poet’s perspective on the natural world. We see the detached, naive viewpoint of the child “naturalist” replaced with a more sophisticated and poetic vision of a world saturated with meaning. While in the first stanza, the life cycle of the frog is a matter of detached observation, sanitized by his school teacher, the poet awakens in the second to the frogs’ “bass chorus”, the experience of “their slap and plop” as “obscene threats”, and finally to the chilling knowledge that “if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it”.
While the poet perhaps regrets the loss of innocence that this experience entailed, his readers may be more grateful. For Heaney’s poem shows that, for him, the death of naturalism was the birth of poetry. Heaney’s poem documents the metaphorical death of the callow student of natural history. But Jason Blakely’s book suggests that there’s an equally unsophisticated kind of naturalism whose demise should be considered, even celebrated. Blakely defines naturalism as a false and usually implicit philosophical view of the nature, scope and limitations of the natural sciences. It’s the reductionist assumption, based on a dichotomy between facts and values, that the natural sciences are properly concerned with objective, verifiable facts while the social sciences are too often distracted by subjective values, meanings and beliefs.
As Blakely argues, what makes naturalism reductionist is its confidence that these subjective, human dimensions of reality will one day be entirely explicable in terms of objective data, such as “brute facts about demography, surrounding environments, or neurobiology”. If naturalism is true, then the explanatory scope of such data could one day be fully extended into the subjective realms explored by the social sciences, and evaluative terms could eventually be eliminated from rational discourse..."--- https://www.the-tls.com/religion/religious-culture/naturalism