Death of an Naturalist A youngster blessed with a vivid imagination is open to disturbing dreams. Flooding the text with sense-data, Heaney describes how an early enthusiasm for nature within his Irish townland was turned into a nightmarish event generated by a youngster’s guilty perception of crime-committed and a foreboding of potential punishment. The poet’s mature, adult eye recalls himself as a boy growing up. Heaney devotes the first nine and a half lines to a natural process. The language is rich in alliterative and assonant effects ( flax-dam festered … heavy-headed) with a vocabulary of fermentation (festered … rotting [...]