Speaker and characters

The poem “Death of a Naturalist” by Seamus Heaney involves a lyrical narrator who is also part of the events described, the character of the teacher – Miss Walls – who is only mentioned, and the collective character of the frogs, which are symbolic.

The narrator 

The lyrical narrator presents the way in which his childhood self interacted with nature. He is the one who describes his fascination and subsequent repulsion with frogs as a child,...

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Inner characterisation

In the first stanza, the speaker comes across as curious, passionate about nature and frogs and excited to find out more about them. Furthermore, the way he talks about “mammy frog” and “daddy frog” indicates his innocence.

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The frogs

Though they are amphibians, the frogs depicted in the poem have an important symbolic function as they represent the speaker’s interest in naturalism and become the cause of his loss of interest in nature.

Initially, they are depicted as interesting creatures acting in a similar way to a family:

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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