Language and style
Language and the style are important analytical elements when discussing poems like “Death of a Naturalist” by Seamus Heaney. Here, we will focus on the following aspects of language and style:
- Playing with the language
- Tense of the verbs
- Type of words used
- Style and mode of expression
- The sentence structure
- Repetition
- The effect of the language and style
Playing with the language
The poet plays with language in the short story through the associations between frogs/frogspawn and human traits and activities. In the first part of the poem, the interactions between frogs are associated with human activities related to family life and intercourse.
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Style and mode of expression
The poem is written in a naive, colloquial style, which gives the childhood memories authenticity and makes readers connect to his past childish perspective on the natural world.
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
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The sentence structure
The grammar structure of the poem reveals both normal, everyday speech sentence structure, as well as inverted syntax meant to help the poet maintain the rhythm of the poem.
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