flax-dam This is not just imagination It comes from Heaney s real experience As a child he often played near ponds and watched frogs This is why the descriptions feel so real He gives a vivid picture of the flax-dam that gives a festered smell and bubbles gargled delicately He writes about buzzing bluebottles flies croaking of frogs dragonflies and spotted butterflies There were dragonflies spotted butterflies The child loves to collect the warm thick slobber of frogspawn These are memories from Heaney s own early life Young Heaney s Curiosity As a boy Heaney loved nature He was curious and excited to learn The poem shows this excitement The young boy in the poem collects frogspawn and keeps it in jars He watches the small dots turn into tadpoles He listens to his teacher Miss Walls talk about frogs She tells the children about how the daddy frog croaks loudly and the mammy frog lays hundreds of eggs The boy also learns that the frogs look yellow in the sun and brown in the rain For they the frogs were yellow in the sun and brown In rain This part of the poem shows Heaney s own curiosity as a boy The Sudden Fear But childhood innocence does not last forever The second half of the poem shows Heaney s loss of childhood innocence The boy in the poem returns to the flax-dam The air is full of a terrible smell of cow dung The frogs seem huge ugly and angry Their bodies look swollen and slimy The boy feels they are ready to take revenge for taking their frogspawn before He thinks The great slime kings Were gathered there for vengeance The frogs seem like an army ready to attack The boy no longer sees them as cute I sickened turned and ran He becomes afraid and disgusted by the frogs He runs away This change from joy to fear is also autobiographical As he grew older he understood the wildness and danger in nature This shows a step forward from his childhood to adolescence Personal Emotions The emotions in the poem like wonder curiosity shock and fear come from Heaney s own mind He writes honestly about how childhood innocence slowly disappears and a deeper understanding of the world begins The fear of the frogs becomes a symbol of growing up The emotions in the poem are strong autobiographical elements To sum up Death of a Naturalist is more than a poem about frogs It is a poem about Heaney s own childhood The farm setting the excitement of collecting frogspawn the sudden fear and the emotional change all come from his personal memories These autobiographical elements make the poem feel so real