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The Daily Poem

Seamus Heaney's "Death of a Naturalist"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6729 Ratings

🗓️ 3 September 2019

⏱️ 9 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

It's Seamus Heaney week on The Daily Poem and it kicks off with his first big poem: "Death of a Naturalist."

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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Transcript

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0:00.0

Welcome back to the Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

0:09.3

Today's poem is by Seamus Heaney, a poet who lived from 1939 to 2013. He was an Irish poet,

0:16.6

playwright, and translator. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. And the sixth anniversary

0:24.7

of his death just occurred. And I wanted to experiment with something here on the podcast,

0:31.0

something I've never done before. The anniversary of his death coincided with the release of a collection of poems from throughout

0:40.8

his life. He had had this idea to release a collection with different poems he selected from

0:46.2

different years in his life. Unfortunately, he passed away before he was able to do that.

0:50.6

But his children and his wife took up the mantle on that effort, and they

0:56.0

released this new book called Shamis Heaney 100 poems. So I'd like to do for the four days we have

1:01.7

this week, yesterday being Labor Day, of course, is to read four different poems from four different

1:08.5

periods in his life. We'll call it Seamus Heaney Weeker,

1:12.7

if you like, I want to see if we can identify some ways that his poems are evolving or changing

1:18.9

over the years and look at a couple of the poems that he personally had earmarked and

1:24.8

then that his family selected for this collection. I think it's pretty

1:28.5

meaningful that they chose a hundred specific poems, trying to maybe get a sense of why.

1:34.4

The first poem that I'm going to read is called Death of a Naturalist, and this is the title poem

1:39.2

from a 1966 collection, the first collection

1:44.8

that Hini released

1:45.7

that was really notable

1:47.9

and really well received.

1:49.8

It was again,

1:50.3

like I said,

...

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